Re: SSI and Hot Standby

On Fri, 2011-01-21 at 00:26 +0100, Florian Pflug wrote:
> On Jan21, 2011, at 00:11 , Simon Riggs wrote:
> > It's not clear to me what the reason is that this doesn't just work on
> > HS already. If you started there it might help.
>
>
> The problem is that snapshots taken on the master sometimes represent a
> state of the database which cannot occur under any (valid) serial schedule.
> Hence, if you use that snapshot to read the *whole* database, you've
> surely violated serializability. If you read only parts of the database,
> things may or may not be fine, depending on the parts you read.
>
> To have the same stringent guarantees that SERIALIZABLE provides on the
> master also for queries run against the slave, you somehow need to prevent
> this. The easiest way is to only use snapshots on the slave which *cannot*
> produce such anomalies. We already know now to generate such snapshots -
> SERIALIZABLE READ ONLY DEFERRABLE does exactly that. So the open question
> is mainly how to transfer such snapshots to the slave, and how often we
> transmit a new one.

Thank you for explaining a little more.

What I'm still not clear on is why that HS is different. Whatever rules
apply on the master must also apply on the standby, immutably. Why is it
we need to pass explicit snapshot information from master to standby? We
don't do that, except at startup for normal HS. Why do we need that?

I hear, but do not yet understand, that the SSI transaction sequence on
the master may differ from the WAL transaction sequence. Is it important
that the ordering on the master would differ from the standby?

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