Peter,
* Peter Eisentraut (peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com) wrote:
> On 3/22/17 17:33, David Steele wrote:
> > and I doubt that most tool writers would be quick to
> > add support for a feature that very few people (if any) use.
>
> I'm not one of those tool writers, although I have written my share of
> DBA scripts over the years, but I wonder why those tools would really
> care. They are handed files with predetermined names to archive, and
> for restore files with predetermined names are requested back from them.
> What else do they need? If something is missing that requires them to
> parse file names, then maybe that should be added.
PG backup technology has come a fair ways from that simple
characterization of it. :)
The backup tools need to also get the LSN from the pg_stop_backup and
verify that they have the WAL file associated with that LSN. They also
need to make sure that they have all of the WAL files between the
starting LSN and the ending LSN. Doing that requires understanding how
the files are named to make sure there aren't any missing.
David will probably point out other reasons that the backup tools need
to understand the file naming, but those are ones I know of off-hand.
Thanks!
Stephen