Re: Patch: Implement failover on libpq connect level.

On Thu, Nov 5, 2015 at 10:12 AM, Victor Wagner <vitus@wagner.pp.ru> wrote:
> There are some drawbacks with this approach
>
> 1. You are suggesting usage of two nested loops, instead of one straight
> loop - outer loop over the URLs in the connect string, inner loop over
> the IP addresses each URL resolves into. (This inner loop already
> presents there for several versions of the postgres).

This isn't really a problem.

> 2. You are suggesting that it should be possible to specify all options
> separately for each of the fallback hosts.
>
> But some options control how
> next host should be choosen (i.e. use random order for load-balancing
> or sequential order for high availability), so they should be specified
> only once per connect string.

But this seems like a point worthy of consideration.

> Third category of options are specified per-cluster much more often
> than per node. But are quite often changed from compiled in default.
> Typically there are authentication credentials (even you use
> trigger-based replication, user information would probably be
> replicated), database name (if you use WAL-level replication), client
> encoding (which depends on more on the client than on server), etc.
>
> It would be pain if we would need specify them for each host separately.
> Syntax, implemented in the my patch allows even to specify
> nonstandard-port once for all hosts (using port= parameter in the query
> string) and override it for particular host in the list using colon
> syntax.

This, too.

> 3. Last, but not least. There is more than one postgresql client
> implementation. Apart of libpq we have jdbc, native GO language client
> etc. And I think that maintaining compatibility of the connect string
> between them is good thing. So, I've modelled syntax of multihost
> feature in the libpq URL-style syntax after jdbc syntax.

Also this.

I'm not sure what the right decision is here - I can see both sides of
it to some degree.  But I think your points deserve to be taken
seriously.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company