Re: Data Corruption in case of abrupt failure

On Tue, 2004-03-16 at 16:44, Tom Lane wrote:
> Stephen Robert Norris <srn(at)commsecure(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
> > On Wed, 2004-03-03 at 23:27, satish satish wrote:
> >> I am trying to do some reliability tests on postgre SQL. I have
> >> use-case where the power can go off abruptly. I initiated 10,000
> >> insert operations and pulled out the cable in the middle. I had
> >> auto-commit option turned on. I observed 2 out of 5 times the tables
> >> were totally corrupted and could not read any data whereas 3 times I
> >> was able to read the data which was inserted.
>
> > We'll need more information - what OS and what version of PostgreSQL at
> > the least.
>
> I doubt this has anything to do with either the OS or the Postgres
> version. My money is on IDE drives with write cache enabled.
> Use drives that don't lie about write completion, and you'll be in
> good shape.
>
> regards, tom lane

I was wondering if he'd turned off fsync(), as seems common for some
reason...

Stephen