Re: Updated backup APIs for non-exclusive backups

* Magnus Hagander (magnus(at)hagander(dot)net) wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 10, 2016 at 2:46 PM, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > On 2016-02-10 13:46:05 +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> > > Per discussionat the developer meeting in Brussels, here's a patch that
> > > makes some updates to the backup APIs, to support non-exclusive backups
> > > without using pg_basebackup.
> >
> > Thanks for following through with this!
> >
> > > * If the client disconnects with a non-exclusive backup running, the
> > backup
> > > is automatically aborted. This is the same thing that pg_basebackup does.
> > > To use these non-exclusive backups the backup software will have to
> > > maintain a persistent connection to the database -- something that should
> > > not be a problem for any of the modern ones out there (but would've been
> > > slightly trickier back in the days when we suggested shellscripts)
> >
> > I think we might want to make this one optional, but I'm not going to
> > fight super hard for it.
>
> Not sure what you're referring to here. Do you mean being able to make a
> non-exclusive backup while not maintaining a connection? That's going to
> make things a *lot* more complicated, as we'd have to invent something like
> "backup slots" similar to what we're doing with replication slots. I doubt
> it's worth all that work and complexity.

Hrmmm. If that's the case then perhaps you're right. I liked the
general idea of not having to maintain a TCP connection during the
entire backup (TCP connections can be annoyingly finicky in certain
environments...), but I'm not sure it's worth a lot of additional
complexity.

Thanks!

Stephen