On 11th of December, Robert Haas committed patch:
Add new wal_level, logical, sufficient for logical decoding. When wal_level=logical, we'll log columns from the old tuple as configured by the REPLICA IDENTITY facility added in commit <a class="text" href="/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=object;h=07cacba983ef79be4a84fcd0e0ca3b5fcb85dd65">07cacba983ef79be4a84fcd0e0ca3b5fcb85dd65</a>. This makes it possible a properly-configured logical replication solution to correctly follow table updates even if they change the chosen key columns, or, with REPLICA IDENTITY FULL, even if the table has no key at all. Note that updates which do not modify the replica identity column won't log anything extra, making the choice of a good key (i.e. one that will rarely be changed) important to performance when wal_level=logical is configured. Each insert, update, or delete to a catalog table will also log the CMIN and/or CMAX values of stamped by the current transaction. This is necessary because logical decoding will require access to historical snapshots of the catalog in order to decode some data types, and the CMIN/CMAX values that we may need in order to judge row visibility may have been overwritten by the time we need them. Andres Freund, reviewed in various versions by myself, Heikki Linnakangas, KONDO Mitsumasa, and many others.
Continue reading Waiting for 9.4 – Add new wal_level, logical, sufficient for logical decoding.