Re: autovacuum and immediate shutdown issues

On Mon, 2009-10-19 at 10:53 -0600, Scott Marlowe wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 10:44 AM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Brad Nicholson <bnichols(at)ca(dot)afilias(dot)info> writes:
> >> On Mon, 2009-10-19 at 12:07 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> >>> That seems like a fundamentally stupid idea, unless you are unconcerned
> >>> with the time and cost of getting the DB running again, which seemingly
> >>> you are.
> >
> >> I disagree that this is fundamentally stupid. We are talking about a
> >> situation where the server is about to die, HA solution kicks in and
> >> moves it to standby.
> >
> > Moving it to standby immediately is a good idea, but it does not follow
> > that you need to hit the DB over the head with a hammer. A fast-mode
> > shutdown seems perfectly adequate. If it isn't, you're going to need
> > nontrivial recovery effort anyhow.
>
> All of this is completely besides the point that a database that's
> been shutdown immediately / had the power cord yanked comes back up
> and doesn't start autovacuuming automatically, which seems a
> non-optimal behaviour.

It's also not going to endear us very much to the VLDB crowd - it will
amounts to a multi-hour crash recovery for those folks while analyze
regenerates statistics.

--
Brad Nicholson 416-673-4106
Database Administrator, Afilias Canada Corp.