Re: Skipping logical replication transactions on subscriber side

On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 1:01 PM Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jun 1, 2021 at 12:55 AM Peter Eisentraut
> <peter.eisentraut@enterprisedb.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 27.05.21 12:04, Amit Kapila wrote:
> > >>> Also, I am thinking that instead of a stat view, do we need
> > >>> to consider having a system table (pg_replication_conflicts or
> > >>> something like that) for this because what if stats information is
> > >>> lost (say either due to crash or due to udp packet loss), can we rely
> > >>> on stats view for this?
> > >> Yeah, it seems better to use a catalog.
> > >>
> > > Okay.
> >
> > Could you store it shared memory?  You don't need it to be crash safe,
> > since the subscription will just run into the same error again after
> > restart.  You just don't want it to be lost, like with the statistics
> > collector.
> >
>
> But, won't that be costly in cases where we have errors in the
> processing of very large transactions? Subscription has to process all
> the data before it gets an error.

I had the same concern. Particularly, the approach we currently
discussed is to skip the transaction based on the information written
by the worker rather than require the user to specify the XID.
Therefore, we will always require the worker to process the same large
transaction after the restart in order to skip the transaction.

> I think we can even imagine this
> feature to be extended to use commitLSN as a skip candidate in which
> case we can even avoid getting the data of that transaction from the
> publisher. So if this information is persistent, the user can even set
> the skip identifier after the restart before the publisher can send
> all the data.

Another possible benefit of writing it to a catalog is that we can
replicate it to the physical standbys. If we have failover slots in
the future, the physical standby server also can resolve the conflict
without processing a possibly large transaction.

> I think the XID (or say another identifier like commitLSN) which we
> want to use for skipping the transaction as specified by the user has
> to be stored in the catalog because otherwise, after the restart we
> won't remember it and the user won't know that he needs to set it
> again. Now, say we have multiple skip identifiers (XIDs, commitLSN,
> ..), isn't it better to store all conflict-related information in a
> separate catalog like pg_subscription_conflict or something like that.
> I think it might be also better to later extend it for auto conflict
> resolution where the user can specify auto conflict resolution info
> for a subscription. Is it better to store all such information in
> pg_subscription or have a separate catalog? It is possible that even
> if we have a separate catalog for conflict info, we might not want to
> store error info there.

Just to be clear, we need to store only the conflict-related
information that cannot be resolved without manual intervention,
right? That is, conflicts cause an error, exiting the workers. In
general, replication conflicts include also conflicts that don’t cause
an error. I think that those conflicts don’t necessarily need to be
stored in the catalog and don’t require manual intervention.

Regards,

--
Masahiko Sawada
EDB:  https://www.enterprisedb.com/