Goodbye Restarts: Dynamic WAL Level in PostgreSQL 19 - Nishchay Kothari

Can you enable logical decoding in PostgreSQL without scheduling a restart? In this Postgres World webinar, Nishchay Kothari, Senior Technical Consultant at Fujitsu, explains the dynamic WAL level behavior presented for PostgreSQL 19. He walks through how PostgreSQL can keep wal_level configured as replica while automatically enabling the additional WAL information needed for logical decoding when a logical replication slot is created. The session covers promotion to logical and the asynchronous return to replica after the last valid logical slot is removed or invalidated. Nishchay also explains how to monitor the active setting with effective_wal_level, what changes on standby servers, and which scenarios to test before using this behavior in production. Through examples involving migrations and temporary change data capture, he explores how this approach can reduce the operational work of enabling logical decoding when it is needed. 🔗 Nishchay Kothari: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nishchay-kothari-3195a3110/ 🔗 Fujitsu: https://global.fujitsu/en-global