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?