The advantage over replication slots is that it’s all “standard” Postgres.
It’s mildly funny that manually implementing a lot of the functionality you get from the WAL rather than using the feature built into the database is the one that’s referred to as standard here :)
I get it though: the WAL isn’t a standard and there are few tools to work with it, the audit table option is pure SQL (with some Postgres dialect) and it’s easier to understand and fix with readily available tools.
But keeping with that subject, I have a question: maybe I’m being stupid here, but does a distributed general WAL implementation exist? Obviously it’s used in many DBs, queues and and other data stores, but in support of a bigger abstraction. What about just the WAL part? Many apps could use a WAL for business logic. You can implement it on top of a relational table (like in the article), which is great but that’s hardly the use for that abstraction. If I have a distributed system and don’t want to have to deal with sharing a file or implementing consensus, what do I use?
It’s mildly funny that manually implementing a lot of the functionality you get from the WAL rather than using the feature built into the database is the one that’s referred to as standard here :)
I get it though: the WAL isn’t a standard and there are few tools to work with it, the audit table option is pure SQL (with some Postgres dialect) and it’s easier to understand and fix with readily available tools.
But keeping with that subject, I have a question: maybe I’m being stupid here, but does a distributed general WAL implementation exist? Obviously it’s used in many DBs, queues and and other data stores, but in support of a bigger abstraction. What about just the WAL part? Many apps could use a WAL for business logic. You can implement it on top of a relational table (like in the article), which is great but that’s hardly the use for that abstraction. If I have a distributed system and don’t want to have to deal with sharing a file or implementing consensus, what do I use?
A good point, poor word choice. Perhaps what I was looking for was “familiar”?