Re: recovery_target_time = 'now' is not an error but still impractical setting

On 2017-08-18 20:51, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 18, 2017 at 4:39 AM, Piotr Stefaniak
> <postgres(at)piotr-stefaniak(dot)me> wrote:
>> On 2017-08-17 11:24, Simon Riggs wrote:
>>> Your suggestion of "furthest" is already the default behaviour.
>>>
>>> Why are you using 'now'? Why would you want to pick a randomly
>>> selected end time?
>>
>> The idea in both cases was to stop the recovery in order to prevent the
>> standby from selecting new timeline. I want to be able to continue the
>> recovery from future WAL files. "Furthest" really meant "as far as
>> possible without completing recovery".
>
> Can you use recovery_target_action='shutdown' instead?

The thing I've tried was a combination of recovery_target_action =
'shutdown' and recovery_target_time = 'now'. Do you mean
recovery_target_action = 'shutdown' and everything else unset (default)?
That leads to the standby selecting new timeline anyway. Adding
standby_mode = on prevents that, but then there is no shutdown. Am I
missing something?

The only way I've managed to get recovery_target_action = 'shutdown' to
work as I needed was to follow advice by Matthijs and Christoph to
combine recovery_target_action with either setting recovery_target_time
to "now" spelled in the usual, non-special way or setting
recovery_target_xid to the latest transaction ID pg_xlogdump could find.
You could also try recovery_target_lsn, but I don't have that in 9.4. I
don't like that line of thought though, so for now I'll use the
restore_command hack I mentioned in the first message of this thread.