Re: Improve logical replication usability when tables lack primary keys

shveta malik <shveta.malik@gmail.com>

From: shveta malik <shveta.malik@gmail.com>
To: Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>
Cc: Euler Taveira <euler@eulerto.com>, GRANT ZHOU <grantzhou@gmail.com>, "houzj.fnst@fujitsu.com" <houzj.fnst@fujitsu.com>, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>, Dilip Kumar <dilipbalaut@gmail.com>, Postgres hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, shveta malik <shveta.malik@gmail.com>
Date: 2026-04-14T05:49:05Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On thinking more about the initial design with a GUC-based approach, I
believe we already have a similar precedent where both a GUC and a
table/column-level property coexist. For example, the
default_toast_compression GUC allows setting a default compression
method globally, while users can still override it at the column level
during CREATE TABLE or ALTER TABLE. A similar approach could work in
our case as well.

Regarding the publication-level property, apart from the potential
data-integrity issues discussed earlier, I also have another concern.
If we introduce a publication-level fallback, we would effectively be
deciding what gets logged in WAL for a particular table (i.e., whether
to log REPLICA IDENTITY FULL) based on a publication parameter. This
does not seem quite right to me. Shouldn't WAL logging typically be
independent of publication configuration? Or do we already have a case
where WAL logging behavior depends on publication-level properties?

Thanks,
Shveta



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  1. Add the notion of REPLICA IDENTITY for a table.