On 13-01-24 06:40 AM, Andres Freund wrote:

Fair enough. I am also working on a user of this infrastructure but that
doesn't help you very much. Steve Singer seemed to make some stabs at
writing an output plugin as well. Steve, how far did you get there?

I was able to get something that generated output for INSERT statements in a format similar to what a modified slony apply trigger would want. This was with the list of tables to replicate hard-coded in the plugin. This was with the patchset from the last commitfest.I had gotten a bit hung up on the UPDATE and DELETE support because slony allows you to use an arbitrary user specified unique index as your key. It looks like better support for tables with a unique non-primary key is in the most recent patch set. I am hoping to have time this weekend to update my plugin to use parameters passed in on the init and other updates in the most recent version. If I make some progress I will post a link to my progress at the end of the weekend. My big issue is that I have limited time to spend on this.


BTW, why does all the transaction reordering stuff has to be in core?
It didn't use to, but people argued pretty damned hard that no undecoded
data should ever allowed to leave the postgres cluster. And to be fair
it makes writing an output plugin *way* much easier. Check
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=users/andresfreund/postgres.git;a=blob;f=contrib/test_decoding/test_decoding.c;hb=xlog-decoding-rebasing-cf4
If you skip over tuple_to_stringinfo(), which is just pretty generic
scaffolding for converting a whole tuple to a string, writing out the
changes in some format by now is pretty damn simple.


I think we will find that the replication systems won't be the only users of this feature. I have often seen systems that have a logging requirement for auditing purposes or to log then reconstruct the sequence of changes made to a set of tables in order to feed a downstream application. Triggers and a journaling table are the traditional way of doing this but it should be pretty easy to write a plugin to accomplish the same thing that should give better performance. If the reordering stuff wasn't in core this would be much harder.


How much of this infrastructure is to support replicating DDL changes? IOW,
if we drop that requirement, how much code can we slash?
Unfortunately I don't think too much unless we add in other code that
allows us to check whether the current definition of a table is still
the same as it was back when the tuple was logged.

Any other features or requirements that could be dropped? I think it's clear at 
this stage that
this patch is not going to be committed as it is. If you can reduce it to a
fraction of what it is now, that fraction might have a chance. Otherwise,
it's just going to be pushed to the next commitfest as whole, and we're
going to be having the same doubts and discussions then.
One thing that reduces complexity is to declare the following as
unsupported:
- CREATE TABLE foo(data text);
- DECODE UP TO HERE;
- INSERT INTO foo(data) VALUES(very-long-to-be-externally-toasted-tuple);
- DROP TABLE foo;
- DECODE UP TO HERE;

but thats just a minor thing.

I think what we can do more realistically than to chop of required parts
of changeset extraction is to start applying some of the preliminary
patches independently:
- the relmapper/relfilenode changes + pg_relation_by_filenode(spc,
   relnode) should be independently committable if a bit boring
- allowing walsenders to connect to a database possibly needs an interface 
change
   but otherwise it should be fine to go in independently. It also has
   other potential use-cases, so I think thats fair.
- logging xl_running_xact's more frequently could also be committed
   independently and makes sense independently as it allows a standby to
   enter HS faster if the master is busy
- Introducing InvalidCommandId should be relatively uncontroversial. The
   fact that no invalid value for command ids exists is imo an oversight
- the *Satisfies change could be applied and they are imo ready but
   there's no use-case for it without the rest, so I am not sure whether
   theres a point
- currently not separately available, but we could add wal_level=logical
   independently. There would be no user of it, but it would be partial
   work. That includes the relcache support for keeping track of the
   primary key which already is available separately.


Greetings,

Andres Freund




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