Re: Better handling of archive_command problems

On Thu, May 16, 2013 at 10:06 PM, Daniel Farina <daniel@heroku.com> wrote:
> Do you have a sketch about mechanism to not encounter that problem?

I didn't until just now, but see my email to Peter.  That idea might
be all wet, but off-hand it seems like it might work...

> However little it may matter, I would like to disagree with your
> opinion on this one: the current situation as I imagine encountered by
> *all* users of archiving is really unpleasant, 'my' shop or no.  It
> would probably not be inaccurate to say that 99.9999% of archiving
> users have to live with a hazy control over the amount of data loss,
> only bounded by how long it takes for the system to full up the WAL
> file system and then for PostgreSQL to PANIC and crash (hence, no more
> writes are processed, and no more data can be lost).

I'm really not trying to pick a fight here.  What I am saying is that
it is the problem is not so bad that we should accept the first design
proposed, despite the obvious problems with it, without trying to find
a better one.  The first post to -hackers on this was 4 days ago.
Feature freeze for the first release that could conceivably contain
this feature will most likely occur about 8 months from now.  We can
take a few more days or weeks to explore alternatives, and I believe
it will be possible to find good ones.  If I were trying to kill this
proposal, I could find better ways to do it than clearly articulating
my concerns at the outset.

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