Re: Issue with recovery_target = 'immediate'

At Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:41:40 -0400, David Steele <david(at)pgmasters(dot)net> wrote in
> While it is certainly true that timeline 2 cannot be replayed to from
> timeline 1, it should not matter for an immediate recovery that stops
> at consistency. No timeline switch will occur until promotion. Of
> course the cluster could be shut down before promotion and the target
> changed, but in that case couldn't timeline be adjusted at that point?
>
> This works by default for PostgreSQL < 12 because the default timeline
> is current. Since PostgreSQL 12 the default has been latest, which
> does not work by default.
>
> When a user does a number of recoveries it is pretty common for the
> timelines to get in a state that will make most subsequent recoveries
> fail. We think it makes sense for recovery_target = 'immediate' to be
> a fail safe that always works no matter the state of the latest
> timeline.
>
> Our solution has been to force recovery_target_timeline = 'current'
> when recovery_target = 'immediate', but it seems like this is
> something that should be done in PostgreSQL instead.
>
> Thoughts?

I think it is natural that recovery defaultly targets the most recent
update. In that sense, at the time the admin decided to recover the
server from the first backup, the second backup is kind of dead, at
least which should be forgotten in the future operation.

Even if we want "any" backup usable, just re-targeting to the current
timeline after the timeline error looks kind of inconsistent to the
behavior mentioned above. To make "dead" backups behave like the
"live" ones, we would need to check if the backup is in the history of
each "future" timelines, then choose the latest timeline from them.

# Mmm. I remember about a recent patch for pg_rewind to do the same...

regards.

--
Kyotaro Horiguchi
NTT Open Source Software Center