Re: pg_walinspect - a new extension to get raw WAL data and WAL stats

On 10/5/21 15:07, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 8, 2021 at 07:18:08PM +0530, Bharath Rupireddy wrote:
>> While working on one of the internal features, we found that it is a
>> bit difficult to run pg_waldump for a normal user to know WAL info and
>> stats of a running postgres database instance in the cloud. Many a
>> times users or DBAs or developers would want to get and analyze
>> following:
>
> Uh, are we going to implement everything that is only available at the
> command line as an extension just for people who are using managed cloud
> services where the command line is not available and the cloud provider
> has not made that information accessible? Seems like this might lead to
> a lot of duplicated effort.

No. For most command line utilities, there's no reason to expose them in
SQL or they already are exposed in SQL. For example, everything in
pg_controldata is already available via SQL functions.

Specifically exposing pg_waldump functionality in SQL could speed up
finding bugs in the PG logical replication code. We found and fixed a
few over this past year, but there are more lurking out there.

Having the extension in core is actually the only way to avoid
duplicated effort, by having shared code which the pg_dump binary and
the extension both wrap or call.

-Jeremy

--
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