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WalShadow: Sub-second Postgres replication to ClickHouse from physical WAL

63 points · 10 comments · spathak

  1. vmsp · · focus · HN ↗
    They're not using `wal_level = logical`, which has been the "friendly" way of doing CDC on Postgres since ever, but are going straight to `wal_level = replica` which, afaik, has never really been used to build something atop of except Postgres' own replication.

    This is very interesting. I'd never have guessed that it'd make such a difference. I also bet this is the sort of thing that would have never end up being implemented without access to coding agents. Having to figure out these protocol-level details is no longer the huge time sink it was

    1. saisrirampur · · focus · HN ↗
      Ack, thank you! The idea was to minimize the operational overhead of logical replication (slot growth, slowdowns from reorder buffering, handling advance schema changes) and reducing load on Postgres. This approach lets us purpose-build replication for ClickHouse. Postgres logical replication was primarily designed keeping in mind with Postgres as the target.

      There’s also some interesting work happening in core with a similar goal of decoupling logical decoding from the Postgres process. We plan to share learnings from WalShadow with the core and hopefully help bring this to Postgres someday :) <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacking.postgres.tv&#x2F;topics&#x2F;logical-decoding&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;hacking.postgres.tv&#x2F;topics&#x2F;logical-decoding&#x2F;

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