Re: [HACKERS] make async slave to wait for lsn to be replayed

Bharath Rupireddy <bharath.rupireddyforpostgres@gmail.com>

From: Bharath Rupireddy <bharath.rupireddyforpostgres@gmail.com>
To: Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>
Cc: Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov@gmail.com>, Kartyshov Ivan <i.kartyshov@postgrespro.ru>, dilipbalaut@gmail.com, smithpb2250@gmail.com, pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2024-03-16T15:05:28Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Sat, Mar 16, 2024 at 4:26 PM Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 15, 2024 at 7:50 PM Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I went through this patch another time, and made some minor
> > adjustments.  Now it looks good, I'm going to push it if no
> > objections.
> >
>
> I have a question related to usability, if the regular reads (say a
> Select statement or reads via function/procedure) need a similar
> guarantee to see the changes on standby then do they also always need
> to first do something like "BEGIN AFTER '0/3F0FF791' WITHIN 1000;"? Or
> in other words, shouldn't we think of something for implicit
> transactions?

+1 to have support for implicit txns. A strawman solution I can think
of is to let primary send its current insert LSN to the standby every
time it sends a bunch of WAL, and the standby waits for that LSN to be
replayed on it at the start of every implicit txn automatically.

The new BEGIN syntax requires application code changes. This led me to
think how one can achieve read-after-write consistency today in a
primary - standby set up. All the logic of this patch, that is,
waiting for the standby to pass a given primary LSN needs to be done
in the application code (or in proxy or in load balancer?). I believe
there might be someone doing this already, it's good to hear from
them.

> In general, it seems this patch has been stuck for a long time on the
> decision to choose an appropriate UI (syntax), and we thought of
> moving it further so that the other parts of the patch can be
> reviewed/discussed. So, I feel before pushing this we should see
> comments from a few (at least two) other senior members who earlier
> shared their opinion on the syntax. I know we don't have much time
> left but OTOH pushing such a change (where we didn't have a consensus
> on syntax) without much discussion at this point of time could lead to
> discussions after commit.

+1 to gain consensus first on the syntax changes. With this, we might
be violating the SQL standard for explicit txn commands (I stand for
correction about the SQL standard though).

-- 
Bharath Rupireddy
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
RDS Open Source Databases
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com



Commits

  1. Ensure standby promotion point in 043_wal_replay_wait.pl

  2. Minor cleanup related to pg_wal_replay_wait() procedure

  3. Adjust pg_wal_replay_wait() procedure behavior on promoted standby

  4. pg_wal_replay_wait(): Fix typo in the doc

  5. Implement pg_wal_replay_wait() stored procedure

  6. Revert: Implement pg_wal_replay_wait() stored procedure

  7. Call WaitLSNCleanup() in AbortTransaction()

  8. Clarify what is protected by WaitLSNLock

  9. Use an LWLock instead of a spinlock in waitlsn.c

  10. Use the pairing heap instead of a flat array for LSN replay waiters

  11. Minor improvements for waitlsn.c

  12. Make the order of the header file includes consistent