Re: Configuring synchronous replication

On Fri, 2010-09-17 at 09:36 -0400, Aidan Van Dyk wrote:

> I want to have them configured in a fsync WAL/style sync rep, I want to
> make sure that if the master comes up first after I get power back, it's
> not going to be claiming transactions are committed while the slave
> (which happens to have 4x the disks because it keeps PITR backups for a
> period too) it still chugging away on SCSI probes yet, not gotten to
> having PostgreSQL up yet...

Nobody has mentioned the ability to persist the not-committed state
across a crash before, and I think it's an important discussion point. 

We already have it: its called "two phase commit". (2PC)

If you run 2PC on 3 servers and one goes down, you can just commit the
in-flight transactions and continue. But it doesn't work on hot standby.

It could: If we want that we could prepare the transaction on the master
and don't allow commit until we get positive confirmation from standby.
All of the machinery is there.

I'm not sure if that's a 5th sync rep mode, or that idea is actually
good enough to replace all the ideas we've had up until now. I would say
probably not, but we should think about this.

A slightly modified idea would be avoid writing the transaction prepare
file as a separate file, just write the WAL for the prepare. We then
remember the LSN of the prepare so we can re-access the WAL copy of it
by re-reading the WAL files on master. Make sure we don't get rid of WAL
that refers to waiting transactions. That would then give us the option
to commit or abort depending upon whether we receive a reply within
timeout.

-- Simon Riggs           www.2ndQuadrant.comPostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training and Services