Re: pg_standby supported versions

Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 00:50 -0500, Decibel! wrote:
>   
>> On Aug 13, 2008, at 4:59 AM, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
>>     
>>> I noticed in the docs for pg_standby (docs/src/sgml/pgstandby.sgml)  
>>> that we have supported version >= 8.2. However it does seem to work  
>>> ok with earlier versions (e.g 8.1) - or am I missing something?
>>>       
>> Hrm, AFAIK it works... Simon?
>>     
>
> It works, yes. But in basic form only.
>
> You'll have problems stopping and starting standby, but the most
> important change is that the process is not restartable. So if you run
> it for a month and then crash, you'll need to re-run the whole month's
> WAL data.
>
>   
Exactly, after posting this I discovered the relevant CVS logs for 
changes to support restartable recovery. It seems to me that perhaps a 
little more detail in the docs would be good here.

At work some folks are using pg_standby with 8.1 and while it does work 
quite well, it took me a wee while to figure out that some of the issues 
they are having are tied up with inability to continue recovery after 
restarting the database or the os!

Best wishes

Mark