I don't see why two daemons are necessary, simply having a separate database (in the CREATE DATABASE sense) should be sufficient to not make a big mess. There a

I don't see why two daemons are necessary, simply having a separate database (in the CREATE DATABASE sense) should be sufficient to not make a big mess. There are lots of fun optimizations you can do like move its storage location to a separate disk to reduce IO contention. You could also avoid making indices on live log tables to improve INSERT performance. You could add an async buffering layer and do bulk-inserts which have much better performance. There's some more interesting discussion on large append-only tables here: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2012-02/msg00083.php http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-performance/2012-02/msg... If you're sufficiently careful, I imagine you could find similar performance with PostgreSQL-based logging as you would with a rotating flatfile log. Except you wouldn't need to worry about consolidating and parsing them.