Re: Streaming Replication patch for CommitFest 2009-09

On Thu, 2009-09-17 at 10:08 +0200, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> Robert Haas suggested a while ago that walreceiver could be a
> stand-alone utility, not requiring postmaster at all. That would allow
> you to set up streaming replication as another way to implement WAL
> archiving. Looking at how the processes interact, there really isn't
> much communication between walreceiver and the rest of the system, so
> that sounds pretty attractive.

Just a small comment in this direction: what if the archive would be
itself a postgres DB, and it would collect the WALs in some special
place (together with some meta data, snapshots, etc), and then a slave
could connect to it just like to any other master ? (except maybe it
could specify which snapshot to to start with and possibly choosing
between different archived WAL streams).

Maybe it is completely stupid what I'm saying, but I see the archive as
just another form of a postgres server, with the same protocol from the
POV of a slave. While I don't have the clue to implement such a thing, I
thought it might be interesting as an idea while discussing the
walsender/receiver interface...

Cheers,
Csaba.