Re: data_checksums enabled by default (was: Move --data-checksums to common options in initdb --help)

Greetings,

* Andres Freund (andres(at)anarazel(dot)de) wrote:
> On 2021-01-06 18:27:48 +0100, Magnus Hagander wrote:
> > The other argument is that admins can cheaply and quickly turn off
> > checksums if they don't want them.
> >
> > The same cannot be said for turning them *on* again, that's a very
> > slow offline operation at this time.
> >
> > Turning off checksums doesn't take noticeably more time than say
> > changing the shared_buffers from the default, which is also almost
> > guaranteed to be wrong for most installations.
>
> It still requires running a binary locally on the DB server, no? Which
> means it'll not be an option on most cloud providers...

... unless they choose to make it an option, which is entirely up to
them and certainly well within what they're capable of doing. I'd also
mention that, at least according to some cloud providers I've talked to,
they specifically wouldn't support PG until data checksums were
available, making me not really feel like having them enabled by default
would be such an issue (not to mention that, clearly, cloud providers
could choose to change the default for their deployments if they wished
to).

Thanks,

Stephen