Re: [HACKERS] Point in Time Recovery

Here is another open PITR issue that I think will have to be addressed
in 7.6. If you do a critical transaction, but do nothing else for eight
hours, that critical transaction hasn't been archived yet. It is still
sitting in pg_xlog until the WAL file fills.

I think we will need to document this behavior and address it in some
way in 7.6. We can't assume that we can send multiple copies of pg_xlog
to the archive (partial and full ones) because we might be going to a
tape drive. However, this is a non-intuitive behavior of our archiver.
We might need to tell people to archive the most recent WAL file every
minute to some other location or something.

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Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > I think we should push the partially complete WAL file to the archive
> > location before shutdown. ...
> > When you are running and finally fill up the WAL file it would then
> > overwrite the one in the archive but I think that is OK.
>
> I don't think this can fly at all. Here are some off-the-top-of-the-head
> objections:
>
> 1. We don't have the luxury of spending indefinite amounts of time to
> do a database shutdown. Commonly we are under a twenty-second sentence
> of death from init. I don't want to spend the 20 seconds waiting to see
> if the archiver will manage to push 16MB onto a slow tape drive. Also,
> if the archiver does fail to push the data in time, it'll likely leave a
> broken (partial) xlog file in the archive, which would be really bad
> news if the user then relies on that.
>
> 2. What if the archiver process entirely fails to push the file? (Maybe
> there's not enough disk space, for instance.) In normal operation we'll
> just retry every so often. We definitely can't do that during shutdown.
>
> 3. You're blithely assuming that the archival process can easily provide
> overwrite semantics for multiple pushes of the same xlog filename. Stop
> thinking about "cp to some directory" and start thinking "dump to tape"
> or "burn onto CD" or something like that. We'll be raising the ante
> considerably if we require the archive_command to deal with this.
>
> I think the last one is really the most significant issue. We have to
> keep the archiver API as simple as possible.
>
> regards, tom lane
>

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