Re: Add an option to skip loading missing publication to avoid logical replication failure

On Mon, Feb 19, 2024 at 12:49 PM vignesh C <vignesh21(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Currently ALTER SUBSCRIPTION ... SET PUBLICATION will break the
> logical replication in certain cases. This can happen as the apply
> worker will get restarted after SET PUBLICATION, the apply worker will
> use the existing slot and replication origin corresponding to the
> subscription. Now, it is possible that before restart the origin has
> not been updated and the WAL start location points to a location prior
> to where PUBLICATION pub exists which can lead to such an error. Once
> this error occurs, apply worker will never be able to proceed and will
> always return the same error.
>
> There was discussion on this and Amit had posted a patch to handle
> this at [2]. Amit's patch does continue using a historic snapshot but
> ignores publications that are not found for the purpose of computing
> RelSyncEntry attributes. We won't mark such an entry as valid till all
> the publications are loaded without anything missing. This means we
> won't publish operations on tables corresponding to that publication
> till we found such a publication and that seems okay.
> I have added an option skip_not_exist_publication to enable this
> operation only when skip_not_exist_publication is specified as true.
> There is no change in default behavior when skip_not_exist_publication
> is specified as false.
>

Did you try to measure the performance impact of this change? We can
try a few cases where DDL and DMLs are involved, missing publication
(drop publication and recreate after a varying number of records to
check the impact).

The other names for the option could be:
skip_notexistant_publications, or ignore_nonexistant_publications. Can
we think of any others?

--
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.