Re: Support logical replication of DDLs

On Fri, May 27, 2022 at 3:49 AM Zheng Li <zhengli10(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Hi Masahiko,
>
> > Thank you for updating the patches!
> >
> > I've not looked at these patches in-depth yet but with this approach,
> > what do you think we can handle the DDL syntax differences between
> > major versions? DDL syntax or behavior could be changed by future
> > changes and I think we need to somehow deal with the differences. For
>
> > example, if the user uses logical replication for major version
> > upgrade, the publisher is older than the subscriber. We might have to
> > rewrite the DDL before applying to the subscriber because the DDL
> > executed on the publisher no longer work on a new PostgreSQL version
>
> I don't think we will allow this kind of situation to happen in the
> first place for
> backward compatibility. If a DDL no longer works on a new version of
> PostgreSQL, the user will have to change the application code as well.
> So even if it happens for
> whatever reason, we could either
> 1. fail the apply worker and let the user fix such DDL because they'll
> have to fix the application code anyway when this happens.
> 2. add guard rail logic in the apply worker to automatically fix such
> DDL if possible, knowing the version of the source and target. Similar
> logic must have been implemented for pg_dump/restore/upgrade.
>
> > or we might have to add some options to the DDL before the application
> > in order to keep the same behavior. This seems to require a different
> > solution from what the patch does for the problem you mentioned such
>
> > as "DDL involving multiple tables where only some tables are
> > replicated”.
>
> First of all, this case can only happen when the customer chooses to
> only replicate a subset of the tables in a database in which case
> table level DDL replication is chosen instead of database level DDL
> replication (where all tables
> and DDLs are replicated). I think the solution would be:
> 1. make best effort to detect such DDLs on the publisher and avoid
> logging of such DDLs in table level DDL replication.
> 2. apply worker will fail to replay such command due to missing
> objects if such DDLs didn't get filtered on the publisher for some
> reason. This should be rare and I think it's OK even if it happens,
> we'll find out
> why and fix it.
>

FWIW, both these cases could be handled with the deparsing approach,
and the handling related to the drop of multiple tables where only a
few are published is already done in the last POC patch shared by Ajin
[1].

[1] - https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAFPTHDaBodoZ5c7U1uyokbvq%2BzUvhJ4ps-7H66nHGw45UnO0OQ%40mail.gmail.com

--
With Regards,
Amit Kapila.