Re: [Proposal] Fully WAL logged CREATE DATABASE - No Checkpoints

On Tue, Jun 15, 2021 at 04:50:24PM +0530, Dilip Kumar wrote:
> Currently, CREATE DATABASE forces a checkpoint, then copies all the
> files, then forces another checkpoint. The comments in the createdb()
> function explain the reasons for this. The attached patch fixes this
> problem by making CREATE DATABASE completely WAL-logged so that now we
> can avoid checkpoints. The patch modifies both CREATE DATABASE and
> ALTER DATABASE..SET TABLESPACE to be fully WAL-logged.
>
> One main advantage of this change is that it will be cheaper. Forcing
> checkpoints on an idle system is no big deal, but when the system is
> under heavy write load, it's very expensive. Another advantage is that
> it makes things better for features like TDE, which might want the
> pages in the source database to be encrypted using a different key or
> nonce than the pages in the target database.

I only had a quick look at the patch but AFAICS your patch makes the new
behavior mandatory. Wouldn't it make sense to have a way to use the previous
approach? People creating wanting to copy somewhat big database and with a
slow replication may prefer to pay 2 checkpoints rather than stream everything.
Same for people who have an otherwise idle system (I often use that to make
temporary backups and/or prepare multiple dataset and most of the time the
checkpoint is basically free).