[mikesun]

"I think what's going on here is that a read-only transaction against a secondary can observe some transaction T, but also miss transactions which must have logically executed before T."

i was intuitively wondering the same but i'm having trouble reasoning how the post's example with transactions 1, 2, 3, 4 exhibits this behavior. in the example, is transaction 2 the only read-only transaction and therefore the only transaction to read from the read replica? i.e. transactions 1, 3, 4 use the primary and transaction 2 uses the read replica?

[aphyr]

Yeah, that's right. It may be that the (apparent) order of transactions differs between primary and secondary.

[franckpachot]

The Write-Ahead Logging (WAL) is single-threaded and maintains consistency at a specific point in time in each instance. However, there can be anomalies between two instances. This behavior is expected because the RDS Multi-AZ cluster does not wait for changes to be applied in the shared buffers. It only waits for the WAL to sync. This is similar to the behavior of PostgreSQL when synchronous_commit is set to on. Nothing unexpected.

[mikesun]

ah, so something like... if the primary ordered transaction 3 < transaction 1, but transaction 2 observes only transaction 1 on the read-only secondary potentially because the secondary orders transaction 1 < transaction 3?