Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)

On Wed, Jun 12, 2013 at 11:32 AM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net> wrote:
> Wouldn't that encourage people to do local archiving, which is almost always
> a bad idea?

Maybe, but refusing to improve the UI because people might then use
the feature seems wrong-headed.

> I'd rather improve the experience with pg_receivexlog or another way that
> does remote archiving...

Sure, remote archiving is great, and I'm glad you've been working on
it. In general, I think that's a cleaner approach, but there are
still enough people using archive_command that we can't throw them
under the bus.

> I guess archiving to a nfs mount or so isn't too bad, but archiving and
> using a cronjob to get the files off is typically a great way to loose data,
> and we really shouldn't encourage that by default, Imo.

Well, I think what we're encouraging right now is for people to do it
wrong. The proliferation of complex tools to manage this process
suggests that it is not easy to manage without a complex tool. That's
a problem. And we regularly have users who discover, under a variety
of circumstances, that they've been doing it wrong. If there's a
better solution than hard-wiring some smarts about local directories,
I'm all ears - but making the simple case just work would still be
better than doing nothing. Right now you have to be a rocket
scientist no matter what configuration you're running.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company