Re: Checksums by default?

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com>
Cc: Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net>, Jim Nasby <Jim(dot)Nasby(at)bluetreble(dot)com>, Petr Jelinek <petr(dot)jelinek(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: Checksums by default?
Date: 2017-01-24 02:07:47
Message-ID: 17720.1485223667@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> writes:
> I thought that checksums went in in part because we thought that there
> was some chance that they'd find bugs in Postgres.

Not really. AFAICS the only point is to catch storage-system malfeasance.

It's barely possible that checksumming would help detect cases where
we'd written data meant for block A into block B, but I don't rate
that as being significantly more probable than bugs in the checksum
code itself. Also, if that case did happen, the checksum code might
"detect" it in some sense, but it would be remarkably unhelpful at
identifying the actual cause.

regards, tom lane

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