Re: [HACKERS] Transaction-controlled robustness for replication

Hi,

Jens-Wolfhard Schicke wrote:
>> * Does WAL get forced to disk on primary at commit time?
>> * Does WAL get forced across link to standby at commit time?
>> * Does WAL get forced to disk on standby at commit time?
> * Does WAL get applied [and synced] to disk on standby at commit time?

I think that's what Simon means by his question no 3. It wouldn't make
much sense to me otherwise.

I'm assuming the standby node has it's own physical format, so the
changes from the remote WAL need to be transformed to a local WAL, which
then needs to be written to disc. For Postgres, this pretty much means
applying the changes and committing them. You never need to store the
remote WAL on physical storage, what would that be good for?

> I think that questions 2 and 3 are trivially bundled together. Once the
> user can specify 2, implementing 3 should be trivial and vice versa.

That might well be, yes. The code to collect changes from a transaction
and then apply them remotely is pretty much the same, no matter when it
is being executed. But it certainly makes a difference in the balance
between performance and availability, which is a decision the user
should be able to make for his specific application (or even better, per
transaction, as proposed here and in Postgres-R).

> I am not even convinced that these need to be two different parameters.

Consider a standby heavily loaded (i/o) with some OLAP queries. Why
should the master wait until the standby has written anything to disk
for him?

> Also please note that an answer of "yes" to 3 means that 2 must also
> be answered "yes".

Agreed. There's no 'AS' mode possible, only 'SS', 'SA' and 'SS'.

> How about creating named modes? This would give the user the ability to
> define more fine-grained control especially in larger clusters of fail-over/read-only
> servers without totally clogging the parameter space and application code.
> Whether this should be done SQL-style or in some config file is not so clear to me,
> although I'd prefer SQL-style like
>
> CREATE SYNCHRONIZING MODE immediate_readonly AS
> LOCAL SYNCHRONOUS APPLY
> 192.168.0.10 SYNCHRONOUS APPLY -- read-only slave
> 192.168.0.11 SYNCHRONOUS APPLY -- read-only slave
> 192.168.0.20 SYNCHRONOUS SHIP -- backup-server
> 192.168.0.21 SYNCHRONOUS SHIP -- backup-server
> 192.168.0.30 SYNHCRONOUS FSYNC -- backup-server with fast disks
> ;

Hm.. that's an interesting idea. Especially considering the number of
options that arise with more than two or three nodes, where you maybe
also want to specify how many nodes must have written the changes to
disk before confirming the commit.

In Postgres-R, I've added a TRANSACTION REPLICATION LEVEL, which can be
either SYNC, EAGER or LAZY. Maybe that's not quite sufficient. On the
other hand, I don't think any other option here makes any sense. (Above,
you yourself doubt that sync is different enough from eager).

Regards

Markus

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