Re: Clarification on a Time travel feature - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Hans-Juergen Schoenig
Subject Re: Clarification on a Time travel feature
Date
Msg-id 413B761A-192C-4E21-B451-CC556EF1DB24@cybertec.at
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In response to Clarification on a Time travel feature  ("Gokulakannan Somasundaram" <gokul007@gmail.com>)
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List pgsql-hackers
hello ...

i guess there is no formal proposal yet but there are some ideas around and some major challenges have been discussed already.
i think simon riggs was planning to work on it in the future.
the basic idea here is to have the option to create a "snapshot" which then stays in the database. the main challenge is that PostgreSQL
should not keep all version of a row since the snapshot but VACUUM should be able to clean out all rows which are not seen by any snapshot or any ongoing transaction.
this should be a quite fancy solution which is quite space efficient.

internally we had the idea of tweaking VACUUM a little:

VACUUM BEFORE timestamp;
and ...
SET current_snapshot TO '2007-10-10 ...';

this would allow a queries to use any snapshot after the timestamp defined by VACUUM (if data is around).
the downside here: you might potentially eat up more space.
flashback data should be read only, of course.

best regards,

hans



On Oct 31, 2007, at 11:31 AM, Gokulakannan Somasundaram wrote:

Hi,
   I went through the mailing list and couldn't get answer to the question.

a) Is there a proposal in place for going back in time within a transaction?



--
Thanks,
Gokul.
CertoSQL Project,
Allied Solution Groups.
(www.alliedgroups.com)



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