On Fri, Sep 2, 2011 at 10:34 AM, Kevin Grittner <kevin.gritt...@wicourts.gov> wrote: > Dimitri Fontaine <dimi...@2ndquadrant.fr> wrote: >> Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >>>> I'm also wondering if providing some shell script examples of a >>>> fault-tolerant script to handle archiving would be useful. >>> >>> I think it would. >> >> My usual advice is to avoid having to write one if possible, >> because it's more complex than it looks. What about recommending >> existing solutions, such as walmgr from Skytools? >> >> Even better, what about including a default archiving tool, that >> could be either another script in bin/ or rather an internal >> command. The default would accept a location as argument, for >> simple needs you mount a remote filesystem and there you go. If >> you need something more complex, you still can provide it >> yourself. > > In a green field I might argue for having an archvie_directory GUC > instead of archive_command. As it stands, it might be a really good > idea to provide a pg_archiveto executable which takes as arguments a > directory path and the arguments passed to the archive script. With > a little extra effort, the executable could check for some file > which would specify what host and path should be writing archives > there, to avoid problems with copied database directories > accidentally writing to the same location as the source. > > Such an executable seems like minimal effort compared to the > problems it would solve. > > If there's an existing tool with appropriate licensing which is > sufficiently portable and reliable, all the better -- let's ship it > and use that for our example archive_command.
Another thought I have here is to wonder whether we should change something on the server side so that we don't NEED such a complicated archive_command. I mean, copying a file to a directory somewhere is not fundamentally a complex operation. Nor is using ssh to copy it to another machine. The fact that archive_commands need to be so complex seems like a usability defect. The consensus seems to be that just using something like 'cp' for your archive command won't work out well, but maybe instead of shipping a more complicated script we should be trying to eliminate (or at least reduce) the need for a more complicated script. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
