Using version GNU parallel 20160222
Currently, sqlmaster appears to populate a table, first dropping any existing table, and waits for jobs to complete. Wondering if there is a way to:
1. populate the database then exit immediately without waiting?
My particular use case is parallelizing backup tasks that are expected to run a long time (several hours on average).
On a related note, why does the sqlworker command require the exact same input as the sqlmaster? Shouldn't it be sufficient that all necessary information is stored in the database and then the sqlworker can just pull tasks from the database? This also ties in to an "append" functionality (see below), since the exact input parameters may not be known for appended tasks, but then again, isn't needed if sufficient info is stored in the DB.
2. append new tasks to an existing database?
I think this is more likely a feature request since the man page specifically says table will be clobbered. As I understand, the reason is that the table schema must/should match, especially the V* columns. But, really, isn't that ultimately a burden for the user (as opposed to the developer)? Perhaps a specific flag allowing "append" operation so user can be duly warned and could still check that the number of V* columns matches.
A sample use case is executing a bunch of generated bash scripts (per above, this is how the parallel backups are handled), so the V1 column is the absolute path to the script and the command is simply "bash".
Cheers,
--Andy