Re: Detecting corrupted pages earlier

Kevin Brown <kevin(at)sysexperts(dot)com> writes:
> Tom Lane wrote:
>> Basically, one should only turn this variable on after giving up on the
>> possibility of getting any data out of the broken page itself. It would
>> be folly to run with it turned on as a normal setting.

> This statement should *definitely* go into the documentation for the
> option, then...

Andrew Sullivan expressed concern about this, too. The thing could
be made a little more failsafe if we made it impossible to set
ZERO_DAMAGED_PAGES to true in postgresql.conf, or by any means other
than an actual SET command --- whose impact would then be limited to
the current session. This is kind of an ugly wart on the GUC mechanism,
but I think not difficult to do with an assign_hook (it just has to
refuse non-interactive settings).

Comments?

regards, tom lane