Re: I'm surprised to see the word master here

"Jonathan S. Katz" <[email protected]> Wed, 2 Oct 2019 09:10:40 -0400
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.db.postgresql.devel.documentation
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 10/2/19 7:39 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
> 
> 
> On Wed, Oct 2, 2019 at 12:57 PM Erikjan Rijkers <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
> 
>     On 2019-10-02 12:46, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>     > On 2019-10-02 10:21, Magnus Hagander wrote:
>     >> Exactly. Both might be accurate, but one comes with a lot less
>     >> baggage.
>     >>
>     >>     I support a search and replace. 
>     >>
>     >> I think it'll take a bit more than just a simple "sed script to
>     >> replace", if that's what you mean. But probably not all that much --
>     >> but
>     >> there can certainly be cases where nearby langaugae also has to be
>     >> changed to make it work properly. But I have a hard time seeing it as
>     >> being a *huge* undertaking.
>     >
>     > I find this proposal to be dubious and unsubstantiated.  Do we need to
>     > get rid of "multimaster", "postmaster"?
>     >
> 
>     IMHO, hat would seem a bad idea.  Let's not take the politicising too
>     far.
> 
>     I would say leave it at abolishing 'slave' (as we have already done).
> 
> 
> But that raises an important point, which is that if we remove master
> entirely from the replication lexicon, then I don't see how multi-master
> makes sense.  If consistency is a goal, postmaster still works but there
> is no alternative to multi-master in common usage.

At various events and tradeshows that include representation from other
database systems, the terminology that I hear is "active-active" -- this
is not one-off, but from a lot of people. This is also a common term for
the major proprietary systems as well. I hear it much more commonly than
"multi-master" even.

> Can I make a suggestion here to help ease that problem:
> 
> We standardize on "primary" and "replica" but on the first usage of
> "primary" we have a parenthetical note that "primary" is sometimes
> called "master" so that terms like multi-master continue to be
> intuitively intelligible. 

I'd +1 s/master/primary/ -- I don't know if it needs parenthetical on
the first usage in places (maybe in sections on replication/clustering,
but not everywhere).

Let's at least consider using "active-active" instead of "multi-master"
given there is already usage of that term in the industry. It would be
good to see what other systems do; matching terminology could have its
advantages. It's not politicizing if we're making the terminology more
inline with the industry.

I don't think postmaster needs to change; this is a title in many
countries[1] and I presume would also require a nontrivial effort and
potentially affect systems.

Jonathan

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmaster
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