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That's how every Postgres extension works (e.g. Timescale, PostGIS, etc.)

Not just Postgres extensions, most of Postgres’ own administrative functions can be triggered in SELECT statements. e.g. pg_terminate_backend()

https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/functions-admin.html

To be quite clear, that always felt weird to me as well - something to the effect of "I thought SELECT was for reading data; why am I using it to create a replica?"

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