• Heikki Linnakangas's avatar
    At promotion, archive last segment from old timeline with .partial suffix. · de768844
    Heikki Linnakangas authored
    Previously, we would archive the possible-incomplete WAL segment with its
    normal filename, but that causes trouble if the server owning that timeline
    is still running, and tries to archive the same segment later. It's not nice
    for the standby to trip up the master's archival like that. And it's pretty
    confusing, anyway, to have an incomplete segment in the archive that's
    indistinguishable from a normal, complete segment.
    
    To avoid such confusion, add a .partial suffix to the file. Or to be more
    precise, make a copy of the old segment under the .partial suffix, and
    archive that instead of the original file. pg_receivexlog also uses the
    .partial suffix for the same purpose, to tell apart incompletely streamed
    files from complete ones.
    
    There is no automatic mechanism to use the .partial files at recovery, so
    they will go unused, unless the administrator manually copies to them to
    the pg_xlog directory (and removes the .partial suffix). Recovery won't
    normally need the WAL - when recovering to the new timeline, it will find
    the same WAL on the first segment on the new timeline instead - but it
    nevertheless feels better to archive the file with the .partial suffix, for
    debugging purposes if nothing else.
    de768844
xlog.c 348 KB