On Thu, Apr 18, 2013 at 2:11 PM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnakan...@vmware.com> wrote: > I just found out that if you use continuous archiving and online backups, > it's surprisingly difficult to restore a backup, without replaying any more > WAL than necessary. > > If you don't set a recovery target, PostgreSQL will recover all the WAL it > finds. You can set recovery target time to a point immediately after the > end-of-backup record, but that's tricky. You have to somehow find out the > exact time when the backup ended, and set it to that. But if you set it any > too early, recovery will abort with "requested recovery stop point is before > consistent recovery point" error. And that's not quite precise anyway; not > all record types carry timestamps, so you will always replay a few extra > records until the first timestamped record comes along. Setting > recovery_target_xid is similarly difficult. If you were well prepared, you > created a named recovery point with pg_create_restore_point() immediately > after the backup ended, and you can use that, but that requires forethought. > > It seems that we're missing a setting, something like recovery_target = > 'immediate', which would mean "stop as soon as consistency is reached". Or > am I missing some trick?
You know, I've been wondering for years how you're supposed to do this. Huge +1 for adding something like this, if it doesn't exist already. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
