Date: Wed, 2 Oct 2019 15:04:55 -0400
From: Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net>
To: Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net>
Cc: "Jonathan S. Katz" <jkatz@postgresql.org>,
	Chris Travers <chris.travers@gmail.com>,
	Erikjan Rijkers <er@xs4all.nl>,
	Peter Eisentraut <peter.eisentraut@2ndquadrant.com>,
	Selena Deckelmann <selena@maxipad.org>,
	Dave Cramer <davecramer@gmail.com>,
	Renee <renee.phillips@gmail.com>,
	Pg Docs <pgsql-docs@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here
Message-ID: <20191002190455.GM6962@tamriel.snowman.net>
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Greetings,

* Magnus Hagander (magnus@hagander.net) wrote:
> 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 m=
uch
> > --
> > >     >> but
> > >     >> there can certainly be cases where nearby langaugae also has t=
o 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 do=
ne).
> > >
> > >
> > > 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-mas=
ter
> > > makes sense.  If consistency is a goal, postmaster still works but th=
ere
> > > 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.
>=20
> That has the tiny problem of not being correct though.
>=20
> 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 replicati=
on
> today is active/active..

I don't agree with this claim.  While we could argue about if a hot
standby is considered "active" or not, the vast majority of the world
considers "active/active" to actually be where you can use the two
systems interchangably, including being able to write to both.  As such,
I disagree with this claim- while perhaps you could make an argument
that it's "technically" correct, it's not how the terms are used in
practice and saying active/active instead would be well understood by
the community and industry at large.

Thanks,

Stephen

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