Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here - Mailing list pgsql-docs

From Magnus Hagander
Subject Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here
Date
Msg-id CABUevEyG2Ax6LJNHdCEih9E7wzKoRFE0egMm+kqVADdR2S8JrA@mail.gmail.com
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In response to Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here  ("Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org>)
Responses Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here  (Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>)
List pgsql-docs


On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 3:10 PM Jonathan S. Katz <jkatz@postgresql.org> wrote:
On 10/2/19 7:39 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
>
>
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 12:57 PM Erikjan Rijkers <er@xs4all.nl
> <mailto:er@xs4all.nl>> wrote:
>
>     On 2019-10-02 12:46, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>     > On 2019-10-02 10:21, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>     >> Exactly. Both might be accurate, but one comes with a lot less
>     >> baggage.
>     >>
>     >>     I support a search and replace. 
>     >>
>     >> I think it'll take a bit more than just a simple "sed script to
>     >> replace", if that's what you mean. But probably not all that much --
>     >> but
>     >> there can certainly be cases where nearby langaugae also has to be
>     >> changed to make it work properly. But I have a hard time seeing it as
>     >> being a *huge* undertaking.
>     >
>     > I find this proposal to be dubious and unsubstantiated.  Do we need to
>     > get rid of "multimaster", "postmaster"?
>     >
>
>     IMHO, hat would seem a bad idea.  Let's not take the politicising too
>     far.
>
>     I would say leave it at abolishing 'slave' (as we have already done).
>
>
> But that raises an important point, which is that if we remove master
> entirely from the replication lexicon, then I don't see how multi-master
> makes sense.  If consistency is a goal, postmaster still works but there
> is no alternative to multi-master in common usage.

At various events and tradeshows that include representation from other
database systems, the terminology that I hear is "active-active" -- this
is not one-off, but from a lot of people. This is also a common term for
the major proprietary systems as well. I hear it much more commonly than
"multi-master" even.

That has the tiny problem of not being correct though.

A classic primary/standby cluster is *also* active/active. It used to be very common to have active/passive clusters -- these were the typical shared-disk-mounted-on-one-node-at-a-time style clusters. This indicates that the standby node isn't available *at all* until after a fail/switchover. So pretty much anything based on our streaming replication today is active/active..

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