Tag: standby

Waiting for 9.3 – Allow a streaming replication standby to follow a timeline switch.

On 13th of December, Heikki Linnakangas committed patch:

Allow a streaming replication standby to follow a timeline switch.
 
Before this patch, streaming replication would refuse to start replicating
if the timeline in the primary doesn't exactly match the standby. The
situation where it doesn't match is when you have a master, and two
standbys, and you promote one of the standbys to become new master.
Promoting bumps up the timeline ID, and after that bump, the other standby
would refuse to continue.
 
There's significantly more timeline related logic in streaming replication
now. First of all, when a standby connects to primary, it will ask the
primary for any timeline history files that are missing from the standby.
The missing files are sent using a new replication command TIMELINE_HISTORY,
and stored in standby's pg_xlog directory. Using the timeline history files,
the standby can follow the latest timeline present in the primary
(recovery_target_timeline='latest'), just as it can follow new timelines
appearing in an archive directory.
 
START_REPLICATION now takes a TIMELINE parameter, to specify exactly which
timeline to stream WAL from. This allows the standby to request the primary
to send over WAL that precedes the promotion. The replication protocol is
changed slightly (in a backwards-compatible way although there's little hope
of streaming replication working across major versions anyway), to allow
replication to stop when the end of timeline reached, putting the walsender
back into accepting a replication command.
 
Many thanks to Amit Kapila for testing and reviewing various versions of
this patch.

Continue reading Waiting for 9.3 – Allow a streaming replication standby to follow a timeline switch.

Setting WAL Replication

There are several approaches on replication/failover – you might have heard of Slony, Londiste, pgPool and some other tools.

WAL Replication is different from all of them in one aspect – it doesn't let you query slave database (until 9.0, in which you actually can run read only queries on slave.

Since you can't run queries on slave, what is it good for? Well. It's good, and great in 1 very important aspect – all things that happen in database are replicated. Schema changes. Sequence modifications. Everything.

There is also drawback – you can't (as of now) replicate just one database. You replicate whole cluster (I don't like this word in this context – let's say: whole installation) of PostgreSQL. All databases that reside in given DATA directory.

So, the question is – how to set it up?

Continue reading Setting WAL Replication

Waiting for 9.0 – removal of 0000000001.history check

I tend to write about new features in new versions of PostgreSQL, but this patch actually fixes one of the things that annoy me a lot, so here it goes:

On 26th of January, Simon Riggs committed:

Log Message:
-----------
Fix longstanding gripe that we check for 0000000001.history at start of
archive recovery, even when we know it is never present.

If you've ever tried to roll your own restore_command script ( like pg_standby ) then you know that to the algorithm that's presented in docs You always had to add special case for file “0000000001.history" – which was never there, but somehow PostgreSQL always asked for it – despite the fact that it could never arrive.

Now, thanks to this small patch we will no longer need to add this “if" in any script. It's small, and it's not a new feature, but I am SO happy to see it.

Waiting for 9.0 – Streaming replication

The BIG feature. The feature that made PostgreSQL leap from 8.4 to 9.0. Patch was written by Fujii Masao, and committed by Heikki Linnakangas on 15th of January 2010:

Log Message:
-----------
Introduce Streaming Replication.
 
This includes two new kinds of postmaster processes, walsenders and
walreceiver. Walreceiver is responsible for connecting to the primary server
and streaming WAL to disk, while walsender runs in the primary server and
streams WAL from disk to the client.
 
Documentation still needs work, but the basics are there. We will probably
pull the replication section to a new chapter later on, as well as the
sections describing file-based replication. But let's do that as a separate
patch, so that it's easier to see what has been added/changed. This patch
also adds a new section to the chapter about FE/BE protocol, documenting the
protocol used by walsender/walreceivxer.
 
Bump catalog version because of two new functions,
pg_last_xlog_receive_location() and pg_last_xlog_replay_location(), for
monitoring the progress of replication.
 
Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me

Continue reading Waiting for 9.0 – Streaming replication