The primary goal of the block incremental backup is to save space in the repository by only storing changed parts of a file rather than the entire file. This implementation is focused on restore performance more than saving space in the repository, though there may be substantial savings depending on the workload.
The repo-block option enables the feature (when repo-bundle is already enabled). The block size is determined based on the file size and age. Very old or very small files will not use block incremental.
Our new policy is to support ten versions of PostgreSQL, the five supported releases and the last five EOL releases. As of PostgreSQL 15, that means 9.0/9.1/9.2 are no longer supported by pgBackRest.
Remove all logic associated with 9.0/9.1/9.2 and update the tests.
Document the new support policy.
Update InfoPg to read/write control versions for the history in backup.info, since we can no longer rely on the mappings being available. In theory this could have been an issue after removing 8.3/8.4 if anybody was using a version that old.
Integration expect log testing was originally used as a rough-and-ready way to make sure that certain code paths were being executed before the unit tests existed. Now that we have 100% unit test coverage (with expect log testing) the value of the integration expect tests seems minimal at best.
But they do cause numerous issues:
- Maintenance of the expect code and replacements that are required to keep logs reproducible.
- Even a trivial change can cause massive churn in the expect logs, e.g. d9088b2. These changes should be minutely audited but since the expect logs have little value now it is seldom worth the effort.
- The OS version used to do expect testing (RHEL7) can only be used to test one version of PostgreSQL. This makes it hard to balance the PostgreSQL version testing between OS versions.
- When a commit affects expect logs it is not clear (especially for new developers) how to regenerate them and our contributing guide is silent on the issue.
The goal is to migrate the integration tests to C and expect testing is not part of that plan. It seems best to get rid of them now.
PostgreSQL 15 drops support for exclusive backup and renames the start/stop backup commands.
This is based on the pgdg-testing repo since beta1 has not been released yet, but it seems unlikely that breaking changes will be made at this point. beta1 should be tagged just before our next release so we'll retest before the release.
Bundle (combine) smaller files during backup to reduce the number of files written to the repository (enable with --bundle). Reducing the number of files is a benefit on all file systems, but especially so on object stores such as S3 that have a high file creation cost. Another benefit is that zero-length files are only stored as metadata in the manifest.
Files are batched up to bundle-size and then compressed/encrypted individually and stored sequentially in the bundle. The bundle id and offset of each file is stored in the manifest so files can be retrieved randomly without needing to read the entire bundle. Files are ordered by timestamp descending when being assigned to bundles to reduce the amount of random access that needs to be done. The idea is that bundles with older files can be read in their entirety on restore and only bundles with newer files will get fragmented.
Bundles are a custom format with metadata stored in the manifest. Tar was considered but it is too limited a format, the major issue being that the size of the file must be known in advance and that is very contrary to how pgBackRest works, especially once we introduce page-level incremental backups.
Bundles are stored numbered in the bundle directory. Some files may still end up in pg_data if they are added after the backup is complete. backup_label is an example.
Currently, only the backup command works in batches. The restore and verify commands use the offsets to pull individual files out of the bundle. It seems better to finalize how this is going to work before optimizing the other commands. Even as is, this is a major step forward, and all commands function with bundling.
One caveat: resume is currently not supported when bundle is enabled.
There is no evidence that users need 8.3/8.4 anymore but it does cost us in terms of development and testing, especially now that we have a number of new backup/restore features planned.
It seems to make sense to remove this support now. If there are users who need to use/migrate from these versions they can use an older version of pgBackRest.
The TLS server is an alternative to using SSH for protocol connections to remote hosts.
This command is currently experimental and intended only for trial and testing. As such, the new commands and options will not show up in the command-line help unless directly requested.
There are no code changes from PostgreSQL 13 so simply add the new version.
Add CATALOG_VERSION_NO_MAX to allow the catalog version to "float" during the PostgreSQL beta/rc period so new pgBackRest versions are not required when the catalog version changes.
Update the integration tests to handle new PostgreSQL startup messages.
The following options are renamed as specified:
repo1-azure-ca-file -> repo1-storage-ca-file
repo1-azure-ca-path -> repo1-storage-ca-path
repo1-azure-host -> repo1-storage-host
repo1-azure-port -> repo1-storage-port
repo1-azure-verify-tls -> repo1-storage-verify-tls
repo1-s3-ca-file -> repo1-storage-ca-file
repo1-s3-ca-path -> repo1-storage-ca-path
repo1-s3-host -> repo1-storage-host
repo1-s3-port -> repo1-storage-port
repo1-s3-verify-tls -> repo1-storage-verify-tls
The old option names (e.g. repo1-s3-port) will continue to work for repo1, but repo2, etc. will require the new names.
Multi-repository implementations for the archive-push, check, info, stanza-create, stanza-upgrade, and stanza-delete commands.
Multi-repo configuration is disabled so there should be no behavioral changes between these commands and their current single-repo implementations.
Multi-repo documentation and integration tests are still in the multi-repo development branch. All unit tests work as multi-repo since they are able to bypass the configuration restrictions.
These values are not used by the Perl integration tests so maybe it would be better to remove them, but for now just update since they should not be changing again for PG13.
Azure and Azure-compatible object stores can now be used for repository storage.
Currently only shared key authentication is supported but SAS will be added soon.
This aligns better with general PostgreSQL usage and our own documentation (updated in 4bcef702).
Usage in the backup.manifest tests has not been updated since it might break the file format.
There don't appear to be any behavioral changes since PostgreSQL 12 and all the tests pass.
Changes to the control/catalog/WAL versions in subsequent betas may break compatibility but pgBackRest will be updated with each release to keep pace.
Rather than bS3 use strStorage which can indicate more than two storage types.
For the moment there are still only two storage types but this change is required before more can be added.
This is consistent with the way BackRest and BackRest test were renamed way back in 18fd2523.
More modules will be moving to pgBackRestDoc soon so renaming now reduces churn later.
This directory was once the home of the production Perl code but since f0ef73db this is no longer true.
Move the modules to test in most cases, except where the module is expected to be useful for the doc engine beyond the expected lifetime of the Perl test code (about a year if all goes well).
The exception is pgBackRest::Version which requires more work to migrate since it is used to track pgBackRest versions.
This was the interface between Perl and C introduced in 36a5349b but since f0ef73db has only been used by the Perl integration tests. This is expensive code to maintain just for testing.
The main dependency was the interface to storage, no matter where it was located, e.g. S3. Replace this with the new-introduced repo commands (d3c83453) that allow access to repo storage via the command line.
The other dependency was on various cfgOption* functions and CFGOPT_ constants that were convenient but not necessary. Replace these with hard-coded strings in most places and create new constants for commonly used values.
Remove all auto-generated Perl code. This means that the error list will no longer be maintained automatically so copy used errors to Common::Exception.pm. This file will need to be maintained manually going forward but there is not likely to be much churn as the Perl integration tests are being retired.
Update test.pl and related code to remove LibC builds.
Ding, dong, LibC is dead.
Add compress-type option and deprecate compress option. Since the compress option is boolean it won't work with multiple compression types. Add logic to cfgLoadUpdateOption() to update compress-type if it is not set directly. The compress option should no longer be referenced outside the cfgLoadUpdateOption() function.
Add common/compress/helper module to contain interface functions that work with multiple compression types. Code outside this module should no longer call specific compression drivers, though it may be OK to reference a specific compression type using the new interface (e.g., saving backup history files in gz format).
Unit tests only test compression using the gz format because other formats may not be available in all builds. It is the job of integration tests to exercise all compression types.
Additional compression types will be added in future commits.
Recovery settings are now written into postgresql.auto.conf instead of recovery.conf. Existing recovery_target* settings will be commented out to help avoid conflicts.
A comment is added before recovery settings to identify them as written by pgBackRest since it is unclear how, in general, old settings will be removed.
recovery.signal and standby.signal are automatically created based on the recovery settings.
The prior method of tailing the docker log no longer seems reliable. Instead, keep retrying the make bucket command until it works and show the error if it times out.
The new name is preferred because pgBackRest does not support any SSL protocol versions (they are all considered to be insecure).
The old name will continue to be accepted.
PostgreSQL 11 introduces configurable WAL segment sizes, from 1MB to 1GB.
There are two areas that needed to be updated to support this: building the archive-get queue and checking that WAL has been archived after a backup. Both operations require the WAL segment size to properly build a list.
Checking the archive after a backup is still implemented in Perl and has an active database connection, so just get the WAL segment size from the database.
The archive-get command does not have a connection to the database, so get the WAL segment size from pg_control instead. This requires a deeper inspection of pg_control than has been done in the past, so it seemed best to copy the relevant data structures from each version of PostgreSQL and build a generic interface layer to address them. While this approach is a bit verbose, it has the advantage of being relatively simple, and can easily be updated for new versions of PostgreSQL.
Since the integration tests generate pg_control files for testing, teach Perl how to generate files with the correct offsets for both 32-bit and 64-bit architectures.
The existing static files would not work with 32-bit or big-endian systems so create functions to generate these files dynamically rather than creating a bunch of new static files.
Refactor storage layer to allow for new repository filesystems using drivers. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
Refactor IO layer to allow for new compression formats, checksum types, and other capabilities using filters. (Reviewed by Cynthia Shang.)
