Hi hackers!

> 8 авг. 2017 г., в 11:27, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> написал(а):
> 
> My point is not to claim that we mustn't put a hook there.  It's that what
> such a hook could safely do is tightly constrained, and you've not offered
> clear evidence that there's something useful to be done within those
> constraints.  Alvaro seems to think that the result might be better
> reached by hooking in at other places, and my gut reaction is similar.
> 


I was studying through work done by Marco and Gabriel on the matter of tracking 
pages for the incremental backup, and I have found PTRACK patch by Yury 
Zhuravlev and PostgresPro [0]. This work seems to be solid and thoughtful. I 
have drafted a new prototype for hooks enabling incremental backup as extension 
based on PTRACK calls.

If you look at the original patch you can see that attached patch differs 
slightly: functionality to track end of critical section is omitted. I have not 
included it in this draft because it changes very sensitive place even for 
those who do not need it.

Subscriber of proposed hook must remember that it is invoked under critical 
section. But there cannot me more than XLR_MAX_BLOCK_ID blocks for one 
transaction. Proposed draft does not add any functionality to track finished 
transactions or any atomic unit of work, just provides a flow of changed block 
numbers. Neither does this draft provide any assumption on where to store this 
information. I suppose subscribers could trigger asynchronous writes somewhere 
as long as info for given segment is accumulated (do we need a hook on segment 
end then?). During inremental backup you can skip scanning those WAL segments 
for which you have accumulated changeset of block numbers.

The thing which is not clear to me: if we are accumulating blocknumbers under 
critical section, then we must place them to preallocated array. When is the 
best time to take away these blocknumbers to empty that array and avoid 
overflow? PTRACK has array of XLR_MAX_BLOCK_ID length and saves these array 
during the end of each critical section. But I want to avoid intervention into 
critical sections.

Thank you for your attention, any thoughts will be appreciated.

Best regards, Andrey Borodin.

[0] https://gist.github.com/stalkerg/ab833d94e2f64df241f1835651e06e4b

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