Per discussion, "location" is a rather vague term that could refer to
multiple concepts. "LSN" is an unambiguous term for WAL locations and
should be preferred. Some function names, view column names, and function
output argument names used "lsn" already, but others used "location",
as well as yet other terms such as "wal_position". Since we've already
renamed a lot of things in this area from "xlog" to "wal" for v10,
we may as well incur a bit more compatibility pain and make these names
all consistent.
David Rowley, minor additional docs hacking by me
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f8O0njDKe8ePFQ-LK5-EjwThsDws6ohJ-+c6nWK+oUxtg@mail.gmail.com
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables. The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included. To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.
Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.
Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.
