On Tue, Jan 3, 2012 at 09:22:22PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote: > On Tue, Dec 27, 2011 at 6:39 AM, Alexander Björnhagen > <alex.bjornha...@gmail.com> wrote: > > And so we get back to the three likelihoods in our two-node setup : > > > > 1.The master fails > > - Okay, promote the standby > > > > 2.The standby fails > > - Okay, the system still works but you no longer have data > > redundancy. Deal with it. > > > > 3.Both fail, together or one after the other. > > It seems to me that if you are happy with #2, you don't really need to > enable sync rep in the first place. > > At any rate, even without multiple component failures, this > configuration makes it pretty easy to lose durability (which is the > only point of having sync rep in the first place). Suppose the NIC > card on the master is the failing component. If it happens to drop > the TCP connection to the clients just before it drops the connection > to the standby, the standby will have all the transactions, and you > can fail over just fine. If it happens to drop the TCP connection to > the just before it drops the connection to the clients, the standby > will not have all the transactions, and failover will lose some > transactions - and presumably you enabled this feature in the first > place precisely to prevent that sort of occurrence. > > I do think that it might be useful to have this if there's a > configurable timeout involved - that way, people could say, well, I'm > OK with maybe losing transactions if the standby has been gone for X > seconds. But if the only possible behavior is equivalent to a > zero-second timeout I don't think it's too useful. It's basically > just going to lead people to believe that their data is more secure > than it really is, which IMHO is not helpful.
Added to TODO: Add a new "eager" synchronous mode that starts out synchronous but reverts to asynchronous after a failure timeout period This would require some type of command to be executed to alert administrators of this change. http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2011-12/msg01224.php -- Bruce Momjian <br...@momjian.us> http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB http://enterprisedb.com + It's impossible for everything to be true. + -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers