Re: Interpreting content of wal

Charles-Antoine Guillat-Guignard wrote:
> Hi list,
>
> I need to recover the content of WAL files, in order to see what
> happened to a database, so I am trying to translate it from binary to
> human-readable log. My goal is to be able to read the modifications that
> were made to my database (the same way mysqlbinlog does for MySQL).

The WAL doesn't contain a record, in a binary form or otherwise, of
anything as high-level as SQL statements. You should be able to get
information on tuple changes, but I wouldn't expect much more.

> I tried compiling xlogdump against PgSQL 8.1 and 8.2 (the WAL files are
> from a 8.1 version), which lead to the same error, with all the WAL
> files I have. I suspect an unattended file structure (version
> mismatch?), though the versions seem to match (except the architecture,
> i386 for my compiling and amd64 for the DB server).

The pgxlogviewer page suggests that 8.1 support isn't present. The code
looks mostly abandoned (last updated in 2006) so you might have some
work ahead of you :S

--
Craig Ringer