Re: Patch for fail-back without fresh backup

On 14.06.2013 14:06, Pavan Deolasee wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 4:12 PM, Heikki Linnakangas<hlinnakangas(at)vmware(dot)com
>> wrote:
>
>> Robert Haas pointed out in that thread that it has a problem with hint
>> bits that are not WAL-logged,
>
> I liked that tool a lot until Robert pointed out the above problem. I
> thought this is a show stopper because I can't really see any way to
> circumvent it unless we enable checksums or explicitly WAL log hint bits.
>
>> but it will still work if you also enable the new checksums feature, which
>> forces hint bit updates to be WAL-logged.
>
> Are we expecting a lot of people to run their clusters with checksums on ?
> Sorry, I haven't followed the checksum discussions and don't know how much
> overhead it causes. But if the general expectation is that checksums will
> be turned on most often, I agree pg_rewind is probably good enough.

Well, time will tell I guess. The biggest overhead with the checksums is
exactly the WAL-logging of hint bits.

>> Perhaps we could add a GUC to enable hint bits to be WAL-logged,
>> regardless of checksums, to make pg_rewind work.
>
> Wouldn't that be too costly ? I mean, in the worst case every hint bit on a
> page may get updated separately. If each such update is WAL logged, we are
> looking for a lot more unnecessary WAL traffic.

Yep, same as with checksums. I was not very enthusiastic about the
checksums patch because of that, but a lot of people are willing to pay
that price. Maybe we can figure out a way to reduce that cost in 9.4.
It'd benefit the checksums greatly.

For pg_rewind, we wouldn't actually need a full-page image for hint bit
updates, just a small record saying "hey, I touched this page". And
you'd only need to write that the first time a page is touched after a
checkpoint.

>> I think that's a more flexible approach to solve this problem. It doesn't
>> require an online feedback loop from the standby to master, for starters.
>
> I agree. That's a big advantage of pg_rewind. Unfortunately, it can't work
> with 9.3 and below because of the hint bits issue, otherwise it would have
> been even more cool.

The proposed patch is clearly not 9.3 material either. If anything,
there's a much better change that we could still sneak in a GUC to allow
hint bits to be WAL-logged without checksums in 9.3. All the code is
there, it'd just be a new guc to control it separetely from checksums.

- Heikki