Re: patch proposal

On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 11:06 PM, Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:
> I could see supporting an additional "pause" option that means "pause at
> the end of WAL if you don't reach the recovery target point".  I'd also
> be happy with a warning being emitted in the log if the recovery target
> point isn't reached before reaching the end of WAL, but I don't think it
> makes sense to change the existing behavior.

Indeed, let's not change the existing behavior. A warning showing up
by default would be useful in itself, even if there are people that I
think set up overly high recovery targets to be sure to replay WAL as
much as possible. As recovery_target_action has meaning when a
recovery target has been reached, I would guess that we would want a
new option that has the same mapping value as recovery_target_action,
except that it activates when the target recovery is *not* reached.
Hence it would be possible to shutdown, pause or promote at will when
recovery completes, and be able to take a separate action is the
recovery target is indeed reached. The default of this parameter would
be "promote", which is what happens now.