On 4/12/24 08:42, David Steele wrote:
> On 4/11/24 20:26, Tomas Vondra wrote:
>> On 4/11/24 03:52, David Steele wrote:
>>> On 4/11/24 10:23, Tom Kincaid wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The extensive Beta process we have can be used to build confidence we
>>>> need in a feature that has extensive review and currently has no known
>>>> issues or outstanding objections.
>>>
>>> I did have objections, here [1] and here [2]. I think the complexity,
>>> space requirements, and likely performance issues involved in restores
>>> are going to be a real problem for users. Some of these can be addressed
>>> in future releases, but I can't escape the feeling that what we are
>>> releasing here is half-baked.
>>>
>> I do not think it's half-baked. I certainly agree there are limitations,
>> and there's all kinds of bells and whistles we could add, but I think
>> the fundamental infrastructure is corrent and a meaningful step forward.
>> Would I wish it to handle .tar for example? Sure I would. But I think
>> it's something we can add in the future - if we require all of this to
>> happen in a single release, it'll never happen.
>
> I'm not sure that I really buy this argument, anyway. It is not uncommon
> for significant features to spend years in development before they are
> committed. This feature went from first introduction to commit in just
> over six months. Obviously Robert had been working on it for a while,
> but for a feature this large six months is a sprint.
>
Sure, but it's also not uncommon for significant features to be
developed incrementally, over multiple releases, introducing the basic
infrastructure first, and then expanding the capabilities later. I'd
cite logical decoding/replication and parallel query as examples of this
approach.
It's possible there's some fundamental flaw in the WAL summarization?
Sure, I can't rule that out, although I find it unlikely. Could there be
bugs? Sure, that's possible, but that applies to all code.
But it seems to me all the comments are about the client side, not about
the infrastructure. Which is fair, I certainly agree it'd be nice to
handle more use cases with less effort, but I still think the patch is a
meaningful step forward.
regards
--
Tomas Vondra
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company