Re: Causal reads take II

On 3 January 2017 at 01:43, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:

> Here is a new version of my "causal reads" patch (see the earlier
> thread from the 9.6 development cycle[1]), which provides a way to
> avoid stale reads when load balancing with streaming replication.

I'm very happy that you are addressing this topic.

I noticed you didn't put in links my earlier doubts about this
specific scheme, though I can see doubts from myself and Heikki at
least in the URLs. I maintain those doubts as to whether this is the
right way forwards.

This patch presumes we will load balance writes to a master and reads
to a pool of standbys. How will we achieve that?

1. We decorate the application with additional info to indicate
routing/write concerns.
2. We get middleware to do routing for us, e.g. pgpool style read/write routing

The explicit premise of the patch is that neither of the above options
are practical, so I'm unclear how this makes sense. Is there some use
case that you have in mind that has not been fully described? If so,
lets get it on the table.

What I think we need is a joined up plan for load balancing, so that
we can understand how it will work. i.e. explain the whole use case
and how the solution works.

I'm especially uncomfortable with any approaches that treat all
sessions as one pool. For me, a server should support multiple pools.
Causality seems to be a property of a particular set of pools. e.g.
PoolS1 supports causal reads against writes to PoolM1 but not PoolM2,
yet PoolS2 does not provide causal reads against PoolM1 orPoolM2.

--
Simon Riggs http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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