Re: [PATCH] Use indexes on the subscriber when REPLICA IDENTITY is full on the publisher

On Mon, Jul 18, 2022 at 8:29 AM Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> IIUC, this proposal is to optimize cases where users can't have a
> unique/primary key for a relation on the subscriber and those
> relations receive lots of updates or deletes?

I think this patch optimizes for all non-trivial cases of update/delete
replication (e.g. >1000 rows in the table, >1000 rows per hour updated)
without a primary key. For instance, it's quite common to have a large
append-mostly events table without a primary key (e.g. because of
partitioning, or insertion speed), which will still have occasional batch
updates/deletes.

Imagine an update of a table or partition with 1 million rows and a typical
scan speed of 1M rows/sec. An update on the whole table takes maybe 1-2
seconds. Replicating the update using a sequential scan per row can take on
the order of ~12 days ≈ 1M seconds.

The current implementation makes using REPLICA IDENTITY FULL a huge
liability/ impractical for scenarios where you want to replicate an
arbitrary set of user-defined tables, such as upgrades, migrations, shard
moves. We generally recommend users to tolerate update/delete errors in
such scenarios.

If the apply worker can use an index, the data migration tool can
tactically create one on a high cardinality column, which would practically
always be better than doing a sequential scan for non-trivial workloads.

cheers,
Marco