On Fri, Apr 19, 2013 at 3:11 AM, 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? > +1. This will be really helpful. I don't know either of any good way to stop immediately after a consistent point now without tricking a target just after the end of backup. -- Michael
