Re: Clean switchover

On 12/06/13 13:15, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Fujii Masao (masao(dot)fujii(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
>> The attached patch fixes this problem. It just changes walsender so that it
>> waits for all the outstanding WAL records to be replicated to the standby
>> before closing the replication connection.
>
> Seems like a good idea to me.. Rather surprised that we're not doing
> this already, to be honest.
>

Yeah +1 from here too. This would make clean switchovers for (typically)
testing scenarios a lot less complex and resource intensive (rebuilding
of the old master as a slave when you know it is ok is despairing on a
huge db).

On the related note (but not actually to do with this patch),
clarifying/expanding the docs about the various methods for standby
promotion:

1/ trigger file creation
2/ pg_ctl promote
3/ renaming/removing recovery.conf

and the differences between them would be great. For instance I only
recently realized that method 3) means the promoted standby does not
start a new timeline (incidentally - could this be an option to pg_ctl
promote) which is very useful for (again) controlled/clean switchovers.

regards

Mark