On 2020-Jun-03, Andres Freund wrote:
> I don't think we should prohibit this. For one, it'd probably break some
> clients, without a meaningful need.
There *is* a need, namely to keep complexity down. This is quite
convoluted, it's got a lot of historical baggage because of the way it
was implemented, and it's very difficult to understand. The greatest
motive I see is to make this easier to understand, so that it is easier
to modify and improve in the future.
> But I think it's also actually quite useful to be able to access
> catalogs before streaming data. You e.g. can look up configuration of
> the primary before streaming WAL. With a second connection that's
> actually harder to do reliably in some cases, because you need to be
> sure that you actually reached the right server (consider a pooler,
> automatic failover etc).
I don't think having a physical replication connection access catalog
data directly is a great idea. We already have gadgets like
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM for physical replication that can do that, and if you
need particular settings you can use SHOW (commit d1ecd539477). If
there was a strong need for even more than that, we can add something to
the grammar.
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Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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