Message-ID: <4CBDB665.60408@2ndquadrant.com>
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 11:16:53 -0400
From: Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com>
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To: Josh Berkus <josh@agliodbs.com>
CC: postgres hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Simplifying replication
References: <4CBCE356.2080703@agliodbs.com>
In-Reply-To: <4CBCE356.2080703@agliodbs.com>
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Josh Berkus wrote:
> It is critical that we make replication easier to set up, administrate 
> and monitor than it currently is.  In my conversations with people, 
> this is more important to our users and the adoption of PostgreSQL 
> than synchronous replication is.

You should enjoy one of the patches we're furiously working on then, 
which is aiming at some of the administration and monitoring pieces 
here.  I have my own grand vision of how easy replication should be to 
setup too.  Visions and plans are nice, but building functional pieces 
of them and delivering them to the community is what actually moves 
PostgreSQL forward.  So far, multiple people have done that for sync 
rep, and what we're supposed to be focused on at this stage in the 
development cycle is finishing the work related to the open CommitFest 
item that includes that.

I find this launch into a new round of bike-shedding a bit distracting.  
If you want this to be easier to use, which it's obvious to any observer 
it should be because what's delivered in 9.0 is way too complicated, 
please work on finding development resources to assign to that problem.  
Because that's the bottleneck on simplifying things, not ideas about 
what to do.  I would recommend finding or assigning a developer to work 
on integrating base backup in to the streaming protocol as the biggest 
single thing that would improve the built-in replication.  All of the 
rest of the trivia about what knobs to set and such are tiny details 
that make for only a minor improvement until that's taken care of.

-- 
Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant US greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us