Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here

On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 3:10 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz(at)postgresql(dot)org>
wrote:

> On 10/2/19 7:39 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
> >
> >
> > On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 12:57 PM Erikjan Rijkers <er(at)xs4all(dot)nl
> > <mailto:er(at)xs4all(dot)nl>> wrote:
> >
> > On 2019-10-02 12:46, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > > On 2019-10-02 10:21, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> > >> Exactly. Both might be accurate, but one comes with a lot less
> > >> baggage.
> > >>
> > >> I support a search and replace.
> > >>
> > >> I think it'll take a bit more than just a simple "sed script to
> > >> replace", if that's what you mean. But probably not all that much
> --
> > >> but
> > >> there can certainly be cases where nearby langaugae also has to be
> > >> changed to make it work properly. But I have a hard time seeing
> it as
> > >> being a *huge* undertaking.
> > >
> > > I find this proposal to be dubious and unsubstantiated. Do we
> need to
> > > get rid of "multimaster", "postmaster"?
> > >
> >
> > IMHO, hat would seem a bad idea. Let's not take the politicising too
> > far.
> >
> > I would say leave it at abolishing 'slave' (as we have already done).
> >
> >
> > But that raises an important point, which is that if we remove master
> > entirely from the replication lexicon, then I don't see how multi-master
> > makes sense. If consistency is a goal, postmaster still works but there
> > is no alternative to multi-master in common usage.
>
> At various events and tradeshows that include representation from other
> database systems, the terminology that I hear is "active-active" -- this
> is not one-off, but from a lot of people. This is also a common term for
> the major proprietary systems as well. I hear it much more commonly than
> "multi-master" even.
>

That has the tiny problem of not being correct though.

A classic primary/standby cluster is *also* active/active. It used to be
very common to have active/passive clusters -- these were the typical
shared-disk-mounted-on-one-node-at-a-time style clusters. This indicates
that the standby node isn't available *at all* until after a
fail/switchover. So pretty much anything based on our streaming replication
today is active/active..

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: https://www.hagander.net/ <http://www.hagander.net/>
Work: https://www.redpill-linpro.com/ <http://www.redpill-linpro.com/>