Re: [RFC][PATCH] wal decoding, attempt #2 - Design Documents (really attached)

On 10/15/2012 04:54 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 3:15 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
> <hlinnakangas(at)vmware(dot)com> wrote:
>> IMHO that's a good thing, and I'd hope this new logical replication to live
>> outside core as well, as much as possible. But whether or not something is
>> in core is just a political decision, not a reason to implement something
>> new.
>>
>> If the only meaningful advantage is reducing the amount of WAL written, I
>> can't help thinking that we should just try to address that in the existing
>> solutions, even if it seems "easy to solve at a first glance, but a solution
>> not using a normal transactional table for its log/queue has to solve a lot
>> of problems", as the document says. Sorry to be a naysayer, but I'm pretty
>> scared of all the new code and complexity these patches bring into core.
> I think what we're really missing at the moment is a decent way of
> decoding WAL. There are a decent number of customers who, when
> presented with replication system, start by asking whether it's
> trigger-based or WAL-based. When you answer that it's trigger-based,
> their interest goes... way down. If you tell them the triggers are
> written in anything but C, you lose a bunch more points. Sure, some
> people's concerns are overblown, but it's hard to escape the
> conclusion that a WAL-based solution can be a lot more efficient than
> a trigger-based solution, and EnterpriseDB has gotten comments from a
> number of people who upgraded to 9.0 or 9.1 to the effect that SR was
> way faster than Slony.
>
> I do not personally believe that a WAL decoding solution adequate to
> drive logical replication can live outside of core, at least not
> unless core exposes a whole lot more interface than we do now, and
> probably not even then. Even if it could, I don't see the case for
> making every replication solution reinvent that wheel. It's a big
> wheel to be reinventing, and everyone needs pretty much the same
> thing.
>
> That having been said, I have to agree that the people working on this
> project seem to be wearing rose-colored glasses when it comes to the
> difficulty of implementing a full-fledged solution in core. I'm right
> on board with everything up to the point where we start kicking out a
> stream of decoded changes to the user... and that's about it. To pick
> on Slony for the moment, as the project that has been around for the
> longest and has probably the largest user base (outside of built-in
> SR, perhaps), they've got a project that they have been developing for
> years and years and years. What have they been doing all that time?
> Maybe they are just stupid, but Chris and Jan and Steve don't strike
> me that way, so I think the real answer is that they are solving
> problems that we haven't even started to think about yet, especially
> around control logic: how do you turn it on? how do you turn it off?
> how do you handle node failures? how do you handle it when a node
> gets behind? We are not going to invent good solutions to all of
> those problems between now and January, or even between now and next
> January.
I understand the the current minimal target is to get on par to current WAL
streaming in terms of setup ease and performance with additional
benefit of having read-write subscribers with at least conflict detection
and logging.

Hoping that we have something by january that solves all possible
replication scenarios out of the box is unrealistic.
>> PS. I'd love to see a basic Slony plugin for this, for example, to see how
>> much extra code on top of the posted patches you need to write in a plugin
>> like that to make it functional. I'm worried that it's a lot..
> I agree. I would go so far as to say that if Slony can't integrate
> with this work and use it in place of their existing change-capture
> facility, that's sufficient grounds for unconditional rejection.
>