Re: Re: Proposal: Store "timestamptz" of database creation on "pg_database"

On 01/03/2013 04:51 PM, Kevin Grittner wrote:
> Robert Haas wrote:
>> Christopher Browne <cbbrowne(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>> these timestamps Should Not be captured or carried forward by
>>> pg_dump.
>>> If we put a creation time into pg_database or pg_class, then
>>> streaming replication will, as a "physical" replication
>>> mechanism, carry the timestamp forward into replicas
>>> And in contrast, I'd expect Andres Freund's logical replication
>>> infrastructure *NOT* to carry these dates over, but rather to
>>> establish fresh new creation dates on a replica. (And from a
>>> forensic perspective, that's a perfectly fine thing.)
>> I agree all around.
> +1
>
> My analogy would be to xmin in tuples. Anything that preserves that
> should preserve table creation timestamp. If the tuples' xmin
> values in the table receiving the data differ, the creation
> timestamp should, too.
>
> In my experience, this would have been valuable forensic
> information many times. Preserving xmin rather than aggressively
> freezing never has been or would have been useful to me.
>

I don't especially have a horse in the race, but ISTM that if you want
the information you want it to be able to persist across dump/restore,
at least optionally. If you can happily lose it when you're forced to
recover using a logical dump then it's not that important to you.

cheers

andrew