Kevin's suggestion seems eminently reasonable to me and probably the best approach one can do for SSI and hot standby. Pulling it off in time for 9.1 would be a stretch; 9.2 seems quite doable.
It's worth noting that one way or another, the semantics of SERIALIZABLE transactions on hot standby replicas could be surprising to some. There's no getting around this; serializability in distributed systems is just a hard problem in general. Either we go with Kevin's suggestion of treating SERIALIZABLE transactions as DEFERRABLE (whether now or for 9.2), causing them to have to use an older snapshot or block until an acceptable snapshot becomes available; or we require them to be downgraded to REPEATABLE READ either implicitly or explicitly. Now, neither of these is as alarming as they might sound, given that replication lag is a fact of life for hot standby systems and REPEATABLE READ is exactly the same as the current (9.0) SERIALIZABLE behavior. But it's definitely something that should be addressed in documentation. Dan -- Dan R. K. Ports MIT CSAIL http://drkp.net/ -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
