On 2020-Jun-03, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2020-06-03 18:27:12 -0400, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > 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.
>
> That seems like a possibly convincing argument for not introducing the
> capability, but doesn't seem strong enough to remove it.
This "capability" has never been introduced. The fact that it's there
is just an accident. In fact, it's not a capability, since the feature
(physical replication) is invoked differently -- namely, using a
physical replication connection. JDBC uses a logical replication
connection for it only because they never realized that they were
supposed to do differently, because we failed to throw the correct
error message in the first place.
> > 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.
>
> Those special case things are a bad idea, and we shouldn't introduce
> more.
What special case things? The replication connection has never been
supposed to run SQL. That's why we have SHOW in the replication
grammar.
> It's unrealistic that we can ever make that support everything,
> and since we already have to support the database connected thing, I
> don't see the point.
A logical replication connection is not supposed to be used for physical
replication. That's just going to make more bugs appear.
--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
