Comment by ben509
6 years ago
> It's a different kind of format however, which -by definition- isn't a replica anymore.
All non-trivial replication has to cross machine boundaries. To transmit to another machine, you have to use a serial format since there are no pointers on the wire. So insisting that a replica must be the same format prohibits the concept of replication in practice.
So, that admin dumped his database but didn't know that the data was using a custom locale which makes recovery troublesome.
How is it a copy if it can't recover the original in some cases?
We're not talking about a compressed archive here, it's a (incomplete) step-by-step instruction to recreate the data. If anything out of norm happens, it's gonna fail-possibly silently.
> How is it a copy if it can't recover the original in some cases?
Do you think a gun is not a gun if it sometimes jams?
> We're not talking about a compressed archive here
I think we have two camps. Mine is considering "copy", "backup", "replica" to be broad categories that are distinguished by simple mathematical or technical properties. For instance, I'd consider a device that copied a single bit to be "copying," even though it's arguably just a wire.
The other camp has very specific products and tasks in mind. A replica is associated with distributed computing, while a backup is something a systems administrator makes as part of disaster recovery.
> Do you think a gun is not a gun if it sometimes jams?
but a pgdump is like a step by step guide for building the gun, leaving out a lot of the process... how can you honestly call that a gun?
but i guess we'll have to agree to disagree. which proves that it was a discussion we shouldn't have started i guess.