It seems to me that the terms "physical", "logical", and "binary" are
always relative to the perspective of the component being worked on.

"Physical" often means "one level of abstraction below mine, and upon which
my work builds".  "Logical" means "my work's level of abstraction".  And
"Binary" means "data which I'm not going to pretend I know or care how to
interpret."

So I'd suggest "block" and "tuple", perhaps.


On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:25 AM, Albe Laurenz <laurenz.a...@wien.gv.at>wrote:

> Andreas Karlsson wrote:
> > On 01/28/2014 10:56 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> >> On 2014-01-28 21:48:09 +0000, Thom Brown wrote:
> >>> On 28 January 2014 21:37, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> On Tue, Jan 28, 2014 at 11:53 AM, Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>>> The point of Andres's patch set is to introduce a new technology
> >>>> called logical decoding; that is, the ability to get a replication
> >>>> stream that is based on changes to tuples rather than changes to
> >>>> blocks.  It could also be called logical replication.  In these
> >>>> patches, our existing replication is referred to as "physical"
> >>>> replication, which sounds kind of funny to me.  Anyone have another
> >>>> suggestion?
> >>>
> >>> Logical and Binary replication?
> >>
> >> Unfortunately changeset extraction output's can be binary data...
> >
> > I think "physical" and "logical" are fine and they seem to be well known
> > terminology. Oracle uses those words and I have also seen many places
> > use "physical backup" and "logical backup", for example on Barman's
> > homepage.
>
> +1
>
> I think it also fits well with the well-known terms "physical [database]
> design" and "logical design".  Not that it is the same thing, but I
> believe that every database person, when faced with the distiction
> "physical" versus "logical", will conclude that the former refers to
> data placement or block structure, while the latter refers to the
> semantics of the data being stored.
>
> Yours,
> Laurenz Albe
>
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