Re: Timeline in the light of Synchronous replication

On Mon, Oct 18, 2010 at 4:31 AM, Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com> wrote:
> But, even though we will have done that, it should be noted that WAL in
> A might be ahead of that in B. For example, A might crash right after
> writing WAL to the disk and before sending it to B. So when we restart
> the old master A as the standby after failover, we should need to delete
> some WAL files (in A) which are inconsistent with the WAL sequence in B.

Right.  There's no way to make it categorically safe to turn A into a
standby, because there's no way to guarantee that the fsyncs of the
WAL happen at the same femtosecond on both machines.  What we should
be looking for is a reliable way to determine whether or not it is in
fact safe.  Timelines are intended to provide that, but there are
holes, so they don't.

-- 
Robert Haas
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