Re: [patch] demote

Hi,

Here is a summary of my work during the last few days on this demote approach.

Please, find in attachment v2-0001-Demote-PoC.patch and the comments in the
commit message and as FIXME in code.

The patch is not finished or bug-free yet, I'm still not very happy with the
coding style, it probably lack some more code documentation, but a lot has
changed since v1. It's still a PoC to push the discussion a bit further after
being myself silent for some days.

The patch is currently relying on a demote checkpoint. I understand a forced
checkpoint overhead can be massive and cause major wait/downtime. But I keep
this for a later step. Maybe we should be able to cancel a running checkpoint?
Or leave it to its synching work but discard the result without wirting it to
XLog?

I hadn't time to investigate Robert's concern about shared memory for snapshot
during recovery.

The patch doesn't deal with prepared xact yet. Testing "start->demote->promote"
raise an assert if some prepared xact exist. I suppose I will rollback them
during demote in next patch version.

I'm not sure how to divide this patch in multiple small independent steps. I
suppose I can split it like:

1. add demote checkpoint
2. support demote: mostly postmaster, startup/xlog and checkpointer related
code
3. cli using pg_ctl demote

...But I'm not sure it worth it.

Regards,