Re: Support logical replication of DDLs

On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 11:03 AM Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 3:49 AM Zheng Li <zhengli10(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > Hi Masahiko,
> >
> > > Thank you for updating the patches!
> > >
> > > I've not looked at these patches in-depth yet but with this approach,
> > > what do you think we can handle the DDL syntax differences between
> > > major versions? DDL syntax or behavior could be changed by future
> > > changes and I think we need to somehow deal with the differences. For
> >
> > > example, if the user uses logical replication for major version
> > > upgrade, the publisher is older than the subscriber. We might have to
> > > rewrite the DDL before applying to the subscriber because the DDL
> > > executed on the publisher no longer work on a new PostgreSQL version
> >
> > I don't think we will allow this kind of situation to happen in the
> > first place for
> > backward compatibility. If a DDL no longer works on a new version of
> > PostgreSQL, the user will have to change the application code as well.
> > So even if it happens for
> > whatever reason, we could either
> > 1. fail the apply worker and let the user fix such DDL because they'll
> > have to fix the application code anyway when this happens.
> > 2. add guard rail logic in the apply worker to automatically fix such
> > DDL if possible, knowing the version of the source and target. Similar
> > logic must have been implemented for pg_dump/restore/upgrade.
> >
> > > or we might have to add some options to the DDL before the application
> > > in order to keep the same behavior. This seems to require a different
> > > solution from what the patch does for the problem you mentioned such
> >
> > > as "DDL involving multiple tables where only some tables are
> > > replicated”.
> >
> > First of all, this case can only happen when the customer chooses to
> > only replicate a subset of the tables in a database in which case
> > table level DDL replication is chosen instead of database level DDL
> > replication (where all tables
> > and DDLs are replicated). I think the solution would be:
> > 1. make best effort to detect such DDLs on the publisher and avoid
> > logging of such DDLs in table level DDL replication.
> > 2. apply worker will fail to replay such command due to missing
> > objects if such DDLs didn't get filtered on the publisher for some
> > reason. This should be rare and I think it's OK even if it happens,
> > we'll find out
> > why and fix it.
> >
>
> FWIW, both these cases could be handled with the deparsing approach,
> and the handling related to the drop of multiple tables where only a
> few are published is already done in the last POC patch shared by Ajin
> [1].
>

Right. So I'm inclined to think that deparsing approach is better from
this point as well as the point mentioned by Álvaro before[1].

Regards,

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/202204081134.6tcmf5cxl3sz%40alvherre.pgsql

--
Masahiko Sawada
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com/