Re: documenting the backup manifest file format

David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>

From: David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: Justin Pryzby <pryzby@telsasoft.com>, Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Amit Kapila <amit.kapila16@gmail.com>, Suraj Kharage <suraj.kharage@enterprisedb.com>, tushar <tushar.ahuja@enterprisedb.com>, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi <rajkumar.raghuwanshi@enterprisedb.com>, Rushabh Lathia <rushabh.lathia@gmail.com>, Tels <nospam-pg-abuse@bloodgate.com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew.dunstan@2ndquadrant.com>, "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Jeevan Chalke <jeevan.chalke@enterprisedb.com>, vignesh C <vignesh21@gmail.com>
Date: 2020-04-14T17:12:51Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Try to avoid compiler warnings in optimized builds.

  2. Fix option related issues in pg_verifybackup.

  3. Add index term for backup manifest in documentation.

  4. Code review for backup manifest.

  5. Document the backup manifest file format.

  6. Fix typo in pg_validatebackup documentation.

  7. Exclude backup_manifest file that existed in database, from BASE_BACKUP.

  8. Msys2 tweaks for pg_validatebackup corruption test

  9. Fix resource management bug with replication=database.

  10. Be more careful about time_t vs. pg_time_t in basebackup.c.

  11. pg_validatebackup: Fix 'make clean' to remove tmp_check.

  12. pg_validatebackup: Also use perl2host in TAP tests.

  13. Generate backup manifests for base backups, and validate them.

  14. Add checksum helper functions.

  15. pg_waldump: Add a --quiet option.

  16. Catversion bump for b9b408c48724

  17. pg_basebackup: Refactor code for reading COPY and tar data.

  18. Use a ResourceOwner to track buffer pins in all cases.

  19. Use ARMv8 CRC instructions where available.

  20. Logical replication support for initial data copy

  21. Use Intel SSE 4.2 CRC instructions where available.

  22. Switch to CRC-32C in WAL and other places.

  23. Remove support for 64-bit CRC.

  24. Change CRCs in WAL records from 64bit to 32bit for performance reasons.

On 4/14/20 12:56 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 13, 2020 at 5:43 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> Yeah, I guess I'm just saying that it feels brittle to have a file
>> format that's supposed to be good for data exchange and then make it
>> itself depend on representation details such as the order that fields
>> appear in, the letter case, or the format of newlines.  Maybe this isn't
>> really of concern, but it seemed strange.
> 
> I didn't want to use JSON for this at all, but I got outvoted. When I
> raised this issue, it was suggested that I deal with it in this way,
> so I did. I can't really defend it too far beyond that, although I do
> think that one nice thing about this is that you can verify the
> checksum using shell commands if you want. Just figure out the number
> of lines in the file, minus one, and do head -n$LINES backup_manifest
> | shasum -a256 and boom. If there were some whitespace-skipping thing
> figuring out how to reproduce the checksum calculation would be hard.
> 
>> I think strict ISO 8601 might be preferable (with the T in the middle
>> and ending in Z instead of " GMT").
> 
> Hmm, did David suggest that before? I don't recall for sure. I think
> he had some suggestion, but I'm not sure if it was the same one.

"I'm also partial to using epoch time in the manifest because it is 
generally easier for programs to work with.  But, human-readable doesn't 
suck, either."

Also you don't need to worry about time-zone conversion errors -- even 
if the source time is UTC this can easily happen if you are not careful. 
It also saves a parsing step.

The downside is it is not human-readable but this is intended to be a 
machine-readable format so I don't think it's a big deal (encoded 
filenames will be just as opaque). If a user really needs to know what 
time some file is (rare, I think) they can paste it with a web tool to 
find out.

Regards,
-- 
-David
david@pgmasters.net