Commit 989be0810d added a flex/bison lexer/parser to interpret
synchronous_standby_names. It was done in a pretty crufty way, though,
making assorted end-use sites responsible for calling the parser at the
right times. That was not only vulnerable to errors of omission, but made
it possible that lexer/parser errors occur at very undesirable times,
and created memory leakages even if there was no error.
Instead, perform the parsing once during check_synchronous_standby_names
and let guc.c manage the resulting data. To do that, we have to flatten
the parsed representation into a single hunk of malloc'd memory, but that
is not very hard.
While at it, work a little harder on making useful error reports for
parsing problems; the previous code felt that "synchronous_standby_names
parser returned 1" was an appropriate user-facing error message. (To
be fair, it did also log a syntax error message, but separately from the
GUC problem report, which is at best confusing.) It had some outright
bugs in the face of invalid input, too.
I (tgl) also concluded that we need to restrict unquoted names in
synchronous_standby_names to be just SQL identifiers. The previous coding
would accept darn near anything, which (1) makes the quoting convention
both nearly-unnecessary and formally ambiguous, (2) makes it very hard to
understand what is a syntax error and what is a creative interpretation of
the input as a standby name, and (3) makes it impossible to further extend
the syntax in future without a compatibility break. I presume that we're
intending future extensions of the syntax, else this parsing infrastructure
is massive overkill, so (3) is an important objection. Since we've taken
a compatibility hit for non-identifier names with this change anyway, we
might as well lock things down now and insist that users use double quotes
for standby names that aren't identifiers.
Kyotaro Horiguchi and Tom Lane
Previously synchronous replication offered only the ability to confirm
that all changes made by a transaction had been transferred to at most
one synchronous standby server.
This commit extends synchronous replication so that it supports multiple
synchronous standby servers. It enables users to consider one or more
standby servers as synchronous, and increase the level of transaction
durability by ensuring that transaction commits wait for replies from
all of those synchronous standbys.
Multiple synchronous standby servers are configured in
synchronous_standby_names which is extended to support new syntax of
'num_sync ( standby_name [ , ... ] )', where num_sync specifies
the number of synchronous standbys that transaction commits need to
wait for replies from and standby_name is the name of a standby
server.
The syntax of 'standby_name [ , ... ]' which was used in 9.5 or before
is also still supported. It's the same as new syntax with num_sync=1.
This commit doesn't include "quorum commit" feature which was discussed
in pgsql-hackers. Synchronous standbys are chosen based on their priorities.
synchronous_standby_names determines the priority of each standby for
being chosen as a synchronous standby. The standbys whose names appear
earlier in the list are given higher priority and will be considered as
synchronous. Other standby servers appearing later in this list
represent potential synchronous standbys.
The regression test for multiple synchronous standbys is not included
in this commit. It should come later.
Authors: Sawada Masahiko, Beena Emerson, Michael Paquier, Fujii Masao
Reviewed-By: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
Amit Langote, Thomas Munro, Sameer Thakur, Suraj Kharage, Abhijit Menon-Sen,
Rajeev Rastogi
Many thanks to the various individuals who were involved in
discussing and developing this feature.
Tom Lane
Fujii Masao