Re: Documentation patch for ALTER SUBSCRIPTION

>> On Feb 4, 2020, at 8:45 PM, Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>>
>> On Fri, Jan 24, 2020 at 2:05 AM David Christensen <david(at)endpoint(dot)com> wrote:
>> Greetings,
>> Enclosed find a documentation patch that clarifies the behavior of ALTER SUBSCRIPTION … REFRESH PUBLICATION with new tables; I ran into a situation today where the docs were not clear that existing tables would not be re-copied, so remedying this situation.
>
> It seems this is already covered in REFRESH PUBLICATION, see "This
> will start replication of tables that were added to the subscribed-to
> publications since the last invocation of REFRESH PUBLICATION or since
> CREATE SUBSCRIPTION.". As far as I understand, this text explains the
> situation you were facing. Can you explain why the text quoted by me
> is not sufficient?

Hi Amit,

From several reads of the text it was not explicitly clear to me that when you issued the copy_data that it would not effectively recopy existing tables in the existing publication, which I had been trying to confirm was not the case prior to running a refresh operation. I had to resort to reviewing the source code to get the answer I was looking for.

If you are already familiar with the operation under the hood I am sure the ambiguity is not there but since I was recently confused by this I wanted to be more explicit in a way that would have helped me answer my original question.

Best,

David