Re: Sensitivity to drive failure?

Israel Brewster <israel(at)ravnalaska(dot)net> writes:
> How sensitive is PostgreSQL to a failure that causes it to loose a single tablespace, while the rest of the database cluster is still accessible? Will it continue running, allowing access to databases that aren't in the missing tablespace, or will it crash (or similar)?

If the tablespace just disappears mid-run, things will not be good; any
dirty buffers for those tables that are hanging around in shared buffers
cannot be written out, so checkpoints cannot complete, so WAL will
accumulate indefinitely (meaning that crash recovery time will grow,
among other bad effects). It's not going to be any better than losing
some random subset of files that aren't separated by tablespace.

I don't recall the details for sure, but I think you could manually
recover from such a scenario by dropping all the affected tables. But
the tablespace mechanism, per se, doesn't help you in this. It's not
designed to be a robustness aid.

regards, tom lane