Re: Core team statement on replication in PostgreSQL

On Thu, 2008-05-29 at 19:02 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Joshua D. Drake" <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> > One customer does not make a hundred. I am not saying that the shipping
> > isn't valid, just that those that I talk to are more interested in the
> > read only slave. Consider that we have any number of ways to solve the
> > problem we are considering implementing now. DRBD being just one of
> > them.
>
> In principle, sure, but there's a big gap between theory and practice
> here. What you are arguing for is the "give the users a toolkit and
> let them figure it out" approach that David was lambasting upthread.

I think maybe my actual argument isn't coming through. What I am arguing
for is not shipping XY without Z. That is all. (and no, I don't think we
should hold up 8.4).

In short. Let's do the feature but don't ship half of it. Ship the whole
thing. If that means it doesn't get into 8.4, then it doesn't get into
8.4.

> People want the bits to go from point A to point B; they don't want
> to have to research, design, test, and administer their own solution
> for moving the bits.

You don't have to convince me. I agree with you.

> I think we have nontrivial
> work in front of us to build a simple, reliable, community-tested
> log shipping solution; and it's not very sexy work either. But it
> needs to get done, and it really needs to get done first. There's
> no point in having read-only slave queries if you don't have a
> trustworthy method of getting the data to them.

O.k. I was with you until here. Log shipping ala pg_standby works fine
now sans read-only slave. No, it isn't out of the box which I can see an
argument for but it is certainly trustworthy. Or do you mean the
synchronous part?

Sincerely,

Joshua D. rake