Re: Hot standby and synchronous replication status

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009, Dimitri Fontaine wrote:

> We should somehow provide a default archive and restore command integrated
> into the main product, so that it's as easy as turning it 'on' in the
> configuration for users to have something trustworthy: PostgreSQL will keep
> past logs into a pg_xlog/archives subdir or some other default place, and
> will know about the setup at startup time when/if needed.

Wandering a little off topic here because this plan reminded me of
something else I've been meaning to improve...while most use-cases require
some sort of network transport for this to be useful, there is one obvious
situation where it would be great to have a ready to roll setup by
default. Right now, if people want to make a filesystem level background
of their database, they first have to grapple with setting up the archive
command to do so. If the system were shipped in a way that made that
trivial to active, perhaps using something like what you describe here,
that would reduce the complaints that PostgreSQL doesn't have any easy way
to grab a filesystem hotcopy of the database. Those rightly pop up
sometimes, and it would be great if the procedure were reduced to:

1) Enable archiving
2) pg_start_backup
3) rsync/tar/cpio/copy/etc.
4) pg_stop_backup
5) Disable archiving

Because the default archive_command was something that supported a
filesystem snapshot using a standard layout.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD