Streaming-only Remastering

So currently we have a major limitation in binary replication, where it is not possible to "remaster" your system (that is, designate the most caught-up standby as the new master) based on streaming replication only. This is a major limitation because the requirement to copy physical logs over scp (or similar methods), manage and expire them more than doubles the administrative overhead of managing replication. This becomes even more of a problem if you're doing cascading replication.

Therefore I think this is a high priority for 9.3.

As far as I can tell, the change required for remastering over streaming is relatively small; we just need to add a new record type to the streaming protocol, and then start writing the timeline change to that. Are there other steps required which I'm not seeing?

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com
San Francisco