[take-five]

Nice UX!

I checked the code and noticed some things that you might want to address in the future (I've done major version upgrades via logical replication myself several times using a script similar to this).

The "default" way of bringing the target DB in sync with the source one (CREATE PUBLICATION on the source then CREATE SUBSCRIPTION on the target) only works for moderately sized databases. Even on ~50GB I noticed that it may take hours to catch up with the origin. There are a couple of solutions:

1. Drop all indices except for the primary keys before performing initial copy, and then restore the indices after all tables have been copied and replication stream started.

2. Instead of copying into a blank database, you could instead create a logical dump using pg_dump with snapshot isolation, restore it on the target DB using pg_restore, create a subscription in the disabled state, advance the logical replication slot to the LSN with which you created the logical dump, and then enable the subscriptions. This way your target database would only have to process the delta between the time you created a dump and the current time. I have a snippet illustrating how we did it: https://gist.github.com/take-five/1dab3a99c8636a93fc69f36ff9....

3. We found out that pg_dump + pg_restore is still very slow on larger databases (~1TB) and it's untenable to wait several hours. Remember that while you're waiting until the dump is being restored, the source database is accumulating WALs which it should later send to the target DB. If left unchecked for 12-18 hours, it could lead to running out of disk space. This was unacceptable for us, so instead of creating a target DB from a logical dump, we created a copy of the source database from AWS RDS snapshot, upgraded it using pg_upgrade and then set up logical replication (similar to how it's described in Percona blog: https://www.percona.com/blog/postgresql-logical-replication-...). Something like this can probably be achieved with ZFS snapshots.

--

Otherwise, it was very similar to how you programmed your library.

Recently, I saw an article here on HN on the same topic of migrating Postgres databases using logical replication. There was a very nice idea to set up _reverse_ logical replication after switchover so that it's possible to roll back quickly in case something breaks.

EDIT: formatting

[shayonj]

These are great shouts! Thank you so much for sharing. One of the operations I ran with this was ~500GB and yeah it takes a few hours to catchup. For us, it wasn't an issue, especially also since we were on AWS Aurora. However, that said, I can totally see it being not feasible on other database engine/systems. I considered the idea of dropping all the indices and re-creating it once the catch up is complete. I'd like pg_easy_replicate it to support that. It should make the initial COPY lot more swift. On a 200GB large DB it cut down down the total time by 90%.

Re: bi-directional replication, you read my mind :). https://github.com/shayonj/pg_easy_replicate/blob/8df94aa93f...

These two features are top of my list to support in pg_easy_replicate

[nijave]

Check out pgcopydb. It uses COPY under the hood in parallel and is a lot faster than pg_dump/pg_restore.