Hi Mat,
Thank you for the pointers on pause_at_recovery_target and recovery_target_time. It worked but I encountered an unexpected situation.
I wanted to test three recovery times by checking data at each point and then proceed to the next. It worked as expected first 2 recovery times but the last one did not give me an opportunity to check data. It simply completed recovery and switched timeline. This means I cannot rollforward anymore unless I restore the database again. Do you think I did something wrong?
You did right, for the first two time targets you have some wal files pending hence pause is allowed. Whereas for the last time target there are no archive files to pause so it has just opened the database as completion of PITR.
I am able to reproduce this on my local as well.
This is from my logs:
2014-02-06 18:54:54 PST-11634---[] LOG: restored log file "0000000100000001000000B8" from archive
2014-02-06 18:54:55 PST-11634---[] LOG: restored log file "0000000100000001000000B9" from archive
2014-02-06 18:54:55 PST-11634---[] LOG: consistent recovery state reached at 1/B90029C8
2014-02-06 18:54:55 PST-11632---[] LOG: database system is ready to accept read only connections
cp: cannot stat `/opt/PostgreSQL/9.3/archives93/0000000100000001000000BA': No such file or directory
B8,B9 applied and looking for next file BA which is not there and no point of pausing without any files, hence it has opened the database. But my guess is, what it has done is right, there no more files to pause and allow you to query, its like completion of PITR.
Same in your case, there may not be any files in your archives directory. You can check for '00000004000000080000000D' file in your archive directory.
,2014-02-22 22:04:16 CSTLOG: restored log file "00000004000000080000000C" from archive
cp: cannot stat `/pgdata/backups/xlogs/minerva_ecl_test/00000004000000080000000D': No such file or directory
