Re: Documentation on PITR still scarce

On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 02:20, Bruce Momjian wrote:

> Is this a TODO?

Yes, but don't hold your breath on that feature.

Gavin and I were discussing briefly a design that would allow something
similar to this. The design would allow the user to stop/start recovery
and turn a debug trace on/off, in a gdb-like mode. Thats a lot easier to
implement than the proposal below, which I agree is desirable. We
haven't hardly started that discussion yet though.
I called this "recovery console" functionality.

I'm not sure I like the Suspended Animation phrase, I thought maybe
TARDIS or Langston Field sums it up better (kidding...)

> Greg Stark wrote:
> >
> > Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> >
> > > I suppose it might be useful to have some kind of "suspended animation"
> > > behavior where you could bring up a backend and look at the database in
> > > a strict read-only fashion, not really executing transactions at all,
> > > just to see what you had. Then you could end the recovery and go to
> > > normal operations, or allow the recovery to proceed further if you
> > > decided this wasn't where you wanted to be yet. However that would
> > > require a great deal of mechanism we haven't got (yet). In particular
> > > there is no such thing as strict read-only examination of the database.
> >
> > That would be a great thing to have one day for other reasons aside from the
> > ability to test out a recovered database. It makes warm standby databases much
> > more useful.
> >
> > A warm standby is when you keep a second machine constantly up to date by
> > applying the archived PITR logs as soon as they come off your server. You're
> > ready to switch over at the drop of a hat and don't have to go through the
> > whole recovery process, you just switch the database from recovery mode to
> > active mode and make it your primary database. But in the until then the
> > backup hardware languishes, completely useless.
> >
> > Oracle has had a feature for a long time that you can actually open the
> > standby database in a strict read-only mode and run queries. This is great for
> > a data warehouse situation where you want to run long batch jobs against
> > recent data.
> >
> > --
> > greg
> >
--
Best Regards, Simon Riggs