"source as background job"

[DrNeurology]

Hi Positron team,
I'm looking for a feature similar to RStudio's "Source as Background Job" / "Run as Local Job" functionality in Positron.
Use Case:
I frequently run SQL queries against our PostgreSQL server using DBI. These queries can take several minutes to complete. In RStudio, I could run these as background jobs, continue working in my console, and return to check the results when ready.
Current Workflow Problem:
When I run a query in Positron, it blocks my console until completion.

Question:
Am I missing an existing feature that provides this functionality? Or is there a recommended workflow in Positron for long-running computations that I'm not aware of?
This seems similar to the workspace duplication feature mentioned in #4657, but I'd prefer to keep everything in the same environment rather than managing separate workspaces.

[juliasilge]

Instead of "background jobs", Positron has support for multiple console sessions. You can run your SQL-via-DBI query in one R session, while keeping another R session (or even 2 or 3 or...) free for you to use for interactive work. Take a look at our documentation on managing console sessions here: https://positron.posit.co/managing-interpreters.html

[DrNeurology]

Thanks for the suggestion, Julia! I appreciate the pointer to multiple console sessions.
I've tried that approach, but I'm running into an issue: when I first want to run the SQL query, I need to execute all the setup code beforehand, and then after executing the query I need to save the results and load them back into my primary R session.
Is there a way to copy variables between environments in different sessions?
That said, I'll definitely use the multiple R session mode for parallel work (like interpreting results with different transformations simultaneously).

[juliasilge]

Ah OK, so you typically use the "Copy job results" functionality of RStudio background jobs, to bring it into that main session in RStudio? We don't have support for that functionality currently and you'd want to take an approach similar to saveRDS(object, "results.rds") as outlined here:
https://docs.posit.co/ide/user/ide/guide/tools/jobs.html#copy-job-results

We can track interest in more complex tooling to move objects between sessions.