When implementing a replication solution ontop of logical decoding, two
related problems exist:
* How to safely keep track of replication progress
* How to change replication behavior, based on the origin of a row;
e.g. to avoid loops in bi-directional replication setups
The solution to these problems, as implemented here, consist out of
three parts:
1) 'replication origins', which identify nodes in a replication setup.
2) 'replication progress tracking', which remembers, for each
replication origin, how far replay has progressed in a efficient and
crash safe manner.
3) The ability to filter out changes performed on the behest of a
replication origin during logical decoding; this allows complex
replication topologies. E.g. by filtering all replayed changes out.
Most of this could also be implemented in "userspace", e.g. by inserting
additional rows contain origin information, but that ends up being much
less efficient and more complicated. We don't want to require various
replication solutions to reimplement logic for this independently. The
infrastructure is intended to be generic enough to be reusable.
This infrastructure also replaces the 'nodeid' infrastructure of commit
timestamps. It is intended to provide all the former capabilities,
except that there's only 2^16 different origins; but now they integrate
with logical decoding. Additionally more functionality is accessible via
SQL. Since the commit timestamp infrastructure has also been introduced
in 9.5 (commit 73c986add) changing the API is not a problem.
For now the number of origins for which the replication progress can be
tracked simultaneously is determined by the max_replication_slots
GUC. That GUC is not a perfect match to configure this, but there
doesn't seem to be sufficient reason to introduce a separate new one.
Bumps both catversion and wal page magic.
Author: Andres Freund, with contributions from Petr Jelinek and Craig Ringer
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Petr Jelinek, Robert Haas, Steve Singer
Discussion: 20150216002155.GI15326@awork2.anarazel.de,
20140923182422.GA15776@alap3.anarazel.de,
20131114172632.GE7522@alap2.anarazel.de
The regression tests for contrib/test_decoding regularly failed on
postgres instances that were very slow. Either because the hardware
itself was slow or because very expensive debugging options like
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS were used.
The reason they failed was just that some additional transactions were
decoded. Analyze and vacuum, triggered by autovac.
To fix just add a option to test_decoding to only display transactions
in which a change was actually displayed. That's not pretty because it
removes information from the tests; but better than constantly failing
tests in very likely harmless ways.
Backpatch to 9.4 where logical decoding was introduced.
Discussion: 20140629142511.GA26930@awork2.anarazel.de
In b89e151054 I had assumed it was ok to use anonymous unions as
struct members, but while a longstanding extension in many compilers,
it's only been standardized in C11.
To fix, remove one of the anonymous unions which tried to hide some
implementation specific enum values and give the other a name. The
latter unfortunately requires changes in output plugins, but since the
feature has only been added a few days ago...
Andres Freund
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables. The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included. To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.
Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.
Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.
Bruce Momjian
Peter Eisentraut
Andres Freund
Robert Haas
Tom Lane