> Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and (s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that need that infor

> Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and (s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up recovery, etc. Maybe only tangentially related, but they also made enhancements to pg_receivexlog that make it acknowledge transactions over the wire. It may not seem like a big deal, but with those changes I was pretty trivially able to patch a version of pg_receivexlog that replicates WALs to HDFS and flushes them (instead of the local FS), so that you can essentially treat HDFS nodes as synchronous standbys. Incredibly useful for setups where your only non-ephemeral storage is HDFS, and the 16MB chunk boundary imposed by archive_command is too course-grained. I'd imagine similar things can be written for lots of other non-posix filesystems that support appending and flushing... Being able to replicate to something that's not just another plain old server is really useful (not to mention how much simpler it is than having to set up an entire other Postgres node just to synchronously ship logs.)