If an error occurs in the foreground (backup) process of pg_basebackup,
and we exit in a controlled way, the background process (streaming
xlog process) would stay around and keep streaming.
Replication slots are a crash-safe data structure which can be created
on either a master or a standby to prevent premature removal of
write-ahead log segments needed by a standby, as well as (with
hot_standby_feedback=on) pruning of tuples whose removal would cause
replication conflicts. Slots have some advantages over existing
techniques, as explained in the documentation.
In a few places, we refer to the type of replication slots introduced
by this patch as "physical" slots, because forthcoming patches for
logical decoding will also have slots, but with somewhat different
properties.
Andres Freund and Robert Haas
Without this, there's no way to pass arbitrary libpq connection parameters
to these applications. It's a bit strange that the option is called
-d/--dbname, when in fact you can *not* pass a database name in it, but it's
consistent with other client applications where a connection string is also
passed using -d.
Original patch by Amit Kapila, heavily modified by me.
libpgcommon is a new static library to allow sharing code among the
various frontend programs and backend; this lets us eliminate duplicate
implementations of common routines. We avoid libpgport, because that's
intended as a place for porting issues; per discussion, it seems better
to keep them separate.
The first use case, and the only implemented by this patch, is pg_malloc
and friends, which many frontend programs were already using.
At the same time, we can use this to provide palloc emulation functions
for the frontend; this way, some palloc-using files in the backend can
also be used by the frontend cleanly. To do this, we change palloc() in
the backend to be a function instead of a macro on top of
MemoryContextAlloc(). This was previously believed to cause loss of
performance, but this implementation has been tweaked by Tom and Andres
so that on modern compilers it provides a slight improvement over the
previous one.
This lets us clean up some places that were already with
localized hacks.
Most of the pg_malloc/palloc changes in this patch were authored by
Andres Freund. Zoltán Böszörményi also independently provided a form of
that. libpgcommon infrastructure was authored by Álvaro.
We had a number of variants on the theme of "malloc or die", with the
majority named like "pg_malloc", but by no means all. Standardize on the
names pg_malloc, pg_malloc0, pg_realloc, pg_strdup. Get rid of pg_calloc
entirely in favor of using pg_malloc0.
This is an essentially cosmetic change, so no back-patch. (I did find
a couple of places where psql and pg_dump were using plain malloc or
strdup instead of the pg_ versions, but they don't look significant
enough to bother back-patching.)
Add option for parallel streaming of the transaction log while a
base backup is running, to get the logfiles before the server has
removed them.
Also add a tool called pg_receivexlog, which streams the transaction
log into files, creating a log archive without having to wait for
segments to complete, thus decreasing the window of data loss without
having to waste space using archive_timeout. This works best in
combination with archive_command - suggested usage docs etc coming later.
