Re: Enabling Checksums

From: Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com>
To: Craig Ringer <craig(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
Cc: Daniel Farina <daniel(at)heroku(dot)com>, Jeff Davis <pgsql(at)j-davis(dot)com>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Enabling Checksums
Date: 2013-03-04 04:19:44
Message-ID: 513420E0.2060005@2ndQuadrant.com
Views: Raw Message | Whole Thread | Download mbox | Resend email
Thread:
Lists: pgsql-hackers

On 3/3/13 10:52 PM, Craig Ringer wrote:
> I also suspect that at least in the first release it might be desirable
> to have an option that essentially says "something's gone horribly wrong
> and we no longer want to check or write checksums, we want a
> non-checksummed DB that can still read our data from before we turned
> checksumming off".

I see that as being something that involves disabling the cluster-wide
flag that turns checksumming on, the one that is reported by
pg_controldata. I think it would have to be a one-way, system down kind
of change, which I think is fair given the ugly (but feasible) situation
you're describing. It would need to be something stronger than a GUC.
Once you start writing out pages without checksums, you're back into the
fuzzy state where some pages have them, others don't, and there's no
good way to deal with that yet.

--
Greg Smith 2ndQuadrant US greg(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support www.2ndQuadrant.com

In response to

Responses

Browse pgsql-hackers by date

  From Date Subject
Next Message Craig Ringer 2013-03-04 04:23:13 Re: Enabling Checksums
Previous Message Craig Ringer 2013-03-04 04:15:24 Re: LIBPQ Implementation Requiring BYTEA Data