Re: Documentation on PITR still scarce - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

OK, how would it be worded?
*  Allow PITR recovery to a read-only server

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Simon Riggs wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-11-29 at 02:20, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> 
> > Is this a TODO?
> 
> Yes, but don't hold your breath on that feature.
> 
> Gavin and I were discussing briefly a design that would allow something
> similar to this. The design would allow the user to stop/start recovery
> and turn a debug trace on/off, in a gdb-like mode. Thats a lot easier to
> implement than the proposal below, which I agree is desirable. We
> haven't hardly started that discussion yet though.
> I called this "recovery console" functionality.
> 
> I'm not sure I like the Suspended Animation phrase, I thought maybe
> TARDIS or Langston Field sums it up better (kidding...)
> 
> > Greg Stark wrote:
> > > 
> > > Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> > > 
> > > > I suppose it might be useful to have some kind of "suspended animation"
> > > > behavior where you could bring up a backend and look at the database in
> > > > a strict read-only fashion, not really executing transactions at all,
> > > > just to see what you had.  Then you could end the recovery and go to
> > > > normal operations, or allow the recovery to proceed further if you
> > > > decided this wasn't where you wanted to be yet.  However that would
> > > > require a great deal of mechanism we haven't got (yet).  In particular
> > > > there is no such thing as strict read-only examination of the database.
> > > 
> > > That would be a great thing to have one day for other reasons aside from the
> > > ability to test out a recovered database. It makes warm standby databases much
> > > more useful.
> > > 
> > > A warm standby is when you keep a second machine constantly up to date by
> > > applying the archived PITR logs as soon as they come off your server. You're
> > > ready to switch over at the drop of a hat and don't have to go through the
> > > whole recovery process, you just switch the database from recovery mode to
> > > active mode and make it your primary database. But in the until then the
> > > backup hardware languishes, completely useless.
> > > 
> > > Oracle has had a feature for a long time that you can actually open the
> > > standby database in a strict read-only mode and run queries. This is great for
> > > a data warehouse situation where you want to run long batch jobs against
> > > recent data.
> > > 
> > > -- 
> > > greg
> > > 
> -- 
> Best Regards, Simon Riggs
> 

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