Re: Add timeline to partial WAL segments

On 12/14/18 3:26 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 13, 2018 at 12:17 AM Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote:
>> On Wed, Dec 12, 2018 at 07:54:05AM -0500, David Steele wrote:
>>> The LSN switch point is often the same even when servers are going to
>>> different timelines. If the LSN is different enough then the problem
>>> solves itself since the .partial will be on an entirely different
>>> segment.
>>
>> That would mean that WAL forked exactly at the same record. You have
>> likely seen more cases where than can happen in real life than I do.
>
> Suppose that the original master fails during an idle period, and we
> promote a slave. But we accidentally promote a slave that can't serve
> as the new master, like because it's in a datacenter with an
> unreliable network connection or one which is about to be engulfed in
> lava.

Much more common than people think.

> So, we go to promote a different slave, and because we never
> got around to reconfiguring the standbys to follow the previous
> promotion, kaboom.

Exactly.

> Or, suppose we do PITR to recover from some user error, but then
> somebody screws up the contents of the recovered cluster and we have
> to do it over again. Naturally we'll recover to the same point.
>
> The new TLI is the only thing that is guaranteed to be unique with
> each new promotion, and I would guess that it is therefore the right
> thing to use to disambiguate them.

This is the conclusion we came to after a few months of diagnosing and
working on this problem.

The question in my mind: is it safe to back-patch?

--
-David
david(at)pgmasters(dot)net