Re: Some ideas about Vacuum - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Heikki Linnakangas
Subject Re: Some ideas about Vacuum
Date
Msg-id 478E4FE9.40205@enterprisedb.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Some ideas about Vacuum  ("Guillaume Smet" <guillaume.smet@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: Some ideas about Vacuum  ("Gokulakannan Somasundaram" <gokul007@gmail.com>)
Re: Some ideas about Vacuum  ("Guillaume Smet" <guillaume.smet@gmail.com>)
Re: Some ideas about Vacuum  (Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>)
List pgsql-hackers
Guillaume Smet wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2008 6:12 PM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com> wrote:
>> Tom Lane escribió:
>>> Possibly true, but if that's the underlying hardware then there's no
>>> performance benefit in breaking WAL up at all, no?
>> Selective PITR shipping.
> 
> If it was possible to launch a PITR only on a given database, that
> could be a great feature too. We have at least one customer who runs
> every database in a separate cluster to be able to do PITR on only one
> database if needed (for example if someone executed a DROP TABLE by
> mistake).

Yeah, it sure would be nice.

I don't think it's going to work too well, though, not without major 
changes at least. What would happen when you restore a PITR backup of 
just one database? Would the other databases still be there in the 
restored cluster? What state would they be in? After restoring one 
database, and doing some stuff on it, could you ever "merge" those 
changes with the rest of the cluster?

Mind you, there's more things shared between databases than the shared 
catalogs. clog for example.

It might be useful for creating read-only copies of a master database, 
but I don't see it being very useful/possible in general.

For more usefulness, we'd need to keep databases more separate from each 
other than we do now. Databases would need to have their own transaction 
counters, for example. Shared relations would obviously need major 
changes for that to work. If we ultimately could separate databases so 
that you could take a filesystem copy of a single database, and restore 
it to another cluster, then per-database WAL and PITR would work.

--   Heikki Linnakangas  EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com


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