On 2 August 2016 at 08:11, Alfred Perlstein <alfred@freebsd.org> wrote:
> On 7/2/16 4:39 AM, Geoff Winkless wrote:
> > I maintain that this is a nonsense argument. Especially since (as you pointed out and as I missed first time
around)the bug actually occurred at different records on different slaves, so he invalidates his own point.
> Seriously?
No, I make a habit of spouting off random arguments to a list full of
people whose opinions I massively respect purely for kicks. What do
you think?
> There's a valid point here, you're sending over commands at the block level, effectively "write to disk at this
location"versus "update this record based on PK", obviously this has some drawbacks that are reason for concern.
Writing values directly into file offsets is only problematic if
something else has failed that has caused the file to be an inexact
copy. If a different bug occurred that caused the primary key to be
corrupted on the slave (or indeed the master), PK-based updates would
exhibit similar propagation errors.
To reiterate my point, uber's described problem came about because of
a bug. Every software has bugs at some point in its life, to pretend
otherwise is simply naive. I'm not trying to excuse the bug, or to
belittle the impact that such a bug has on data integrity or on uber
or indeed on the reputation of PostgreSQL. While I'm prepared to
accept (because I have a job that requires I spend time on things
other than digging through obscure reddits and mailing lists to
understand more fully the exact cause) that in _this particular
instance_ the bug was propagated because of the replication mechanism
(although I'm still dubious about that, as per my comment above), that
does _not_ preclude other bugs propagating in a statement-based
replication. That's what I said is a nonsense argument, and no-one has
yet explained in what way that's incorrect.
Geoff