On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 12:14 PM, Josh Berkus <j...@agliodbs.com> wrote:
> > >> The archive command can be made a shell script (or that matter a > >> compiled program) which can do anything it wants upon failure, including > >> emailing people. > > You're talking about using external tools -- frequently hackish, > workaround ones -- to handle something which PostgreSQL should be doing > itself, and which only the database engine has full knowledge of. I think the database engine is about the last thing which would have full knowledge of the best way to contact the DBA, especially during events which by definition mean things are already going badly. I certainly don't see having core code which knows how to talk to every PBX, SMS, email system, or twitter feed that anyone might wish to use for logging. PostgreSQL already supports two formats of text logs, plus syslog and eventlog. Is there some additional logging management tool that we could support which is widely used, doesn't require an expensive consultant to set-up and configure correctly (or even to decide what "correctly" means for the given situation), and which solves 80% of the problems? It would be nice to have the ability to specify multiple log destinations with different log_min_messages for each one. I'm sure syslog already must implement some kind of method for doing that, but I've been happy enough with the text logs that I've never bothered to look into it much. > While > that's the only solution we have for now, it's hardly a worthy design goal. > > Right now, what we're telling users is "You can have continuous backup > with Postgres, but you'd better hire and expensive consultant to set it > up for you, or use this external tool of dubious provenance which > there's no packages for, or you might accidentally cause your database > to shut down in the middle of the night." > > At which point most sensible users say "no thanks, I'll use something > else". > What does the something else do? Hopefully it is not "silently invalidate your backups". Cheers, Jeff
