Just a quick note on my stab at it - it was physical only, which is more limited than this of course. My plan was to clean it up based on feedback in the next couple of days for the Jan cf, but with this submission in i think the effort is better directed there. I'll keep mine around as a backup in case something shows up with yours so it won't make it on time since mine is simpler.
Attached is patch which adds ability to do fast-forwarding while decoding. That means wal is consumed as fast as possible and changes are not given to output plugin for sending. The implementation is less invasive than I originally though it would be. Most of it is just additional filter condition in places where we would normally filter out changes because we don't yet have full snapshot.
This is useful for multiple things. It enables us to do the replication slot advance for both physical and logical slots, something that Magnus took stab at some time ago, but does not seem like it went anywhere (this is useful for replication tooling). This patch adds SQL visible pg_replication_slot_advance() function for that use case.
It also makes second phase (after we reached SNAPBUILD_FULL_SNAPSHOT) of replication slot creation faster, especially when there are big transactions as the reorder buffer does not have to deal with data changes and does not have to spill to disk.
And finally it will be useful for developing failover support of slots.
