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
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.
Andres Freund
Robert Haas