Re: SSI and Hot Standby

On Jan21, 2011, at 00:11 , Simon Riggs wrote:
> It's not clear to me what the reason is that this doesn't just work on
> HS already. If you started there it might help.

The problem is that snapshots taken on the master sometimes represent a
state of the database which cannot occur under any (valid) serial schedule.
Hence, if you use that snapshot to read the *whole* database, you've
surely violated serializability. If you read only parts of the database,
things may or may not be fine, depending on the parts you read.

To have the same stringent guarantees that SERIALIZABLE provides on the
master also for queries run against the slave, you somehow need to prevent
this. The easiest way is to only use snapshots on the slave which *cannot*
produce such anomalies. We already know now to generate such snapshots -
SERIALIZABLE READ ONLY DEFERRABLE does exactly that. So the open question
is mainly how to transfer such snapshots to the slave, and how often we
transmit a new one.

best regards,
Florian Pflug