RE: Support logical replication of DDLs

On Monday, March 27, 2023 8:08 PM Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 12:07 PM Amit Kapila <amit(dot)kapila16(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
> >
> > On Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 2:52 AM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > >
> >
> > > I suggest taking a couple of steps back from the minutiae of the
> > > patch, and spending some hard effort thinking about how the thing
> > > would be controlled in a useful fashion (that is, a real design for
> > > the filtering that was mentioned at the very outset), and about the
> > > security issues, and about how we could get to a committable patch.
> > >
> >
> > Agreed. I'll try to summarize the discussion we have till now on this
> > and share my thoughts on the same in a separate email.
> >
>
> The idea to control what could be replicated is to introduce a new publication
> option 'ddl' along with current options 'publish' and
> 'publish_via_partition_root'. The values of this new option could be 'table',
> 'function', 'all', etc. Here 'all' enables the replication of all supported DDL
> commands. Example usage for this would be:
> Example:
> Create a new publication with all ddl replication enabled:
> CREATE PUBLICATION pub1 FOR ALL TABLES with (ddl = 'all');
>
> Enable table ddl replication for an existing Publication:
> ALTER PUBLICATION pub2 SET (ddl = 'table');
>
> This is what seems to have been discussed but I think we can even extend it to
> support based on operations/commands, say one would like to publish only
> 'create' and 'drop' of tables. Then we can extend the existing publish option to
> have values like 'create', 'alter', and 'drop'.
>
> Another thing we are considering related to this is at what level these
> additional options should be specified. We have three variants FOR TABLE, FOR
> ALL TABLES, and FOR TABLES IN SCHEMA that enables replication. Now, for the
> sake of simplicity, this new option is discussed to be provided only with FOR
> ALL TABLES variant but I think we can provide it with other variants with some
> additional restrictions like with FOR TABLE, we can only specify 'alter' and
> 'drop' for publish option. Now, though possible, it brings additional
> complexity to support it with variants other than FOR ALL TABLES because then
> we need to ensure additional filtering and possible modification of the content
> we have to send to downstream. So, we can even decide to first support it only
> FOR ALL TABLES variant.
>
> The other point to consider for publish option 'ddl = table' is whether we need
> to allow replicating dependent objects like say some user-defined type is used
> in the table. I guess the difficulty here would be to identify which dependents
> we want to allow.
>
> I think in the first version we should allow to replicate only some of the objects
> instead of everything. For example, can we consider only allowing tables and
> indexes in the first version? Then extend it in a phased manner?

I think supporting table related stuff in the first version makes sense and the
patch size could be reduced to a suitable size. I also checked other DBs design
for reference, the IBM DB2's DDL replication functionality[1] is similar to what
is proposed here(e.g. only replicate table related DDL: TABLE/INDEX/KEY ..). We
can extend it to support other non-table objects in the following patch set.

[1] https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/idr/11.4.0?topic=dr-how-q-capture-handles-ddl-operations-source-database

Best Regards,
Hou zj