This will be one of my shorter posts. pgadmin III allows for the development of scheduled tasks that run on your PostgreSQL database. As my PostGIS triggers have gotten more complicated, and since they run per transaction to keep ACID compliance, a big mess can be made by just updating a dataset (this is what vacuum is good for), and the time for inserts can be astronomical. Take, e.g. my previous post. Each record insert, because of the trigger, takes about 30 seconds to complete. That’s way to slow, especially if I want updates to happen during the business day. Enter pgagent.

pgagent has been well covered by other’s blogs, so I’ll post two links that were helpful to me for administering it in Windows:

http://www.mkyong.com/database/how-to-install-pgagent-on-windows-postgresql-job-scheduler/

http://www.postgresonline.com/journal/index.php?/archives/19-Setting-up-PgAgent-and-Doing-Scheduled-Backups.html