Change the order of checks in similar functions to be the same; remove
a parameter that's not needed anymore; rename a memory context and
expand a couple of comments.
Per review comments from Amit Kapila
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.
The functions in slotfuncs.c don't exist in any released version,
but the changes to xlogfuncs.c represent backward-incompatibilities.
Per discussion, we're hoping that the queries using these functions
are few enough and simple enough that this won't cause too much
breakage for users.
Michael Paquier, reviewed by Andres Freund and further modified
by me.
Replication slots are a crash-safe data structure which can be created
on either a master or a standby to prevent premature removal of
write-ahead log segments needed by a standby, as well as (with
hot_standby_feedback=on) pruning of tuples whose removal would cause
replication conflicts. Slots have some advantages over existing
techniques, as explained in the documentation.
In a few places, we refer to the type of replication slots introduced
by this patch as "physical" slots, because forthcoming patches for
logical decoding will also have slots, but with somewhat different
properties.
Andres Freund and Robert Haas
Andres Freund
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas