Re: Add contrib/pg_logicalsnapinspect

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 30, 2024 at 03:43:12PM +0530, Amit Kapila wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 6:33 PM Bharath Rupireddy
> <bharath(dot)rupireddyforpostgres(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >
> > On Thu, Aug 29, 2024 at 3:44 PM Bertrand Drouvot
> > <bertranddrouvot(dot)pg(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > >
> > > Yeah that's fair. And now I'm wondering if we need an extra module. I think
> > > we could "simply" expose 2 new functions in core, thoughts?
> > >
> > > > > What do you think? Did you have something else in mind?
> > > > >
> > > >
> > > > On similar lines, we can also provide a function to get the slot's
> > > > on-disk data.
> > >
> > > Yeah, having a way to expose the data from the disk makes fully sense to me.
> > >
> > > > IIRC, Bharath had previously proposed a tool to achieve
> > > > the same. It is fine if we don't want to add that as part of this
> > > > patch but I mentioned it because by having that we can have a set of
> > > > functions to view logical decoding data.
> > >
> > > That's right. I think this one would be simply enough to expose one or two
> > > functions in core too (and probably would not need an extra module).
> >
> > +1 for functions in core unless this extra module
> > pg_logicalsnapinspect works as a tool to be helpful even when the
> > server is down.
> >
>
> We have an example of pageinspect which provides low-level functions
> to aid debugging. The proposal for these APIs also seems to fall in
> the same category,

That's right, but...

> so why go for the core for these functions?

as we decided not to expose the SnapBuildOnDisk and SnapBuild structs to public
and to create/expose 2 new functions in snapbuild.c then the functions in the
module would do nothing but expose the data coming from the snapbuild.c's
functions (get the tuple and send it to the client). That sounds weird to me to
create a module that would "only" do so, that's why I thought that in core
functions taking care of everything make more sense.

Regards,

--
Bertrand Drouvot
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
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