Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here

On 10/2/19 7:39 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 12:57 PM Erikjan Rijkers <er(at)xs4all(dot)nl
> <mailto:er(at)xs4all(dot)nl>> wrote:
>
> On 2019-10-02 12:46, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> > On 2019-10-02 10:21, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> >> Exactly. Both might be accurate, but one comes with a lot less
> >> baggage.
> >>
> >>     I support a search and replace. 
> >>
> >> I think it'll take a bit more than just a simple "sed script to
> >> replace", if that's what you mean. But probably not all that much --
> >> but
> >> there can certainly be cases where nearby langaugae also has to be
> >> changed to make it work properly. But I have a hard time seeing it as
> >> being a *huge* undertaking.
> >
> > I find this proposal to be dubious and unsubstantiated.  Do we need to
> > get rid of "multimaster", "postmaster"?
> >
>
> IMHO, hat would seem a bad idea.  Let's not take the politicising too
> far.
>
> I would say leave it at abolishing 'slave' (as we have already done).
>
>
> But that raises an important point, which is that if we remove master
> entirely from the replication lexicon, then I don't see how multi-master
> makes sense.  If consistency is a goal, postmaster still works but there
> is no alternative to multi-master in common usage.

At various events and tradeshows that include representation from other
database systems, the terminology that I hear is "active-active" -- this
is not one-off, but from a lot of people. This is also a common term for
the major proprietary systems as well. I hear it much more commonly than
"multi-master" even.

> Can I make a suggestion here to help ease that problem:
>
> We standardize on "primary" and "replica" but on the first usage of
> "primary" we have a parenthetical note that "primary" is sometimes
> called "master" so that terms like multi-master continue to be
> intuitively intelligible.

I'd +1 s/master/primary/ -- I don't know if it needs parenthetical on
the first usage in places (maybe in sections on replication/clustering,
but not everywhere).

Let's at least consider using "active-active" instead of "multi-master"
given there is already usage of that term in the industry. It would be
good to see what other systems do; matching terminology could have its
advantages. It's not politicizing if we're making the terminology more
inline with the industry.

I don't think postmaster needs to change; this is a title in many
countries[1] and I presume would also require a nontrivial effort and
potentially affect systems.

Jonathan

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmaster