Re: Database quota

Tom Lane wrote:
> Fernando Schapachnik <fschapachnik(at)vianetworks(dot)com(dot)ar> writes:
>
>>Is there any way to stablish a maximum size for a database? Would
>>setting each database directory to user:pgsql, 770 and setting a file
>>system quota for user "user" work? I mean, would postmaster handle
>>the limit gracefully?
>
>
> If you can exclude pg_xlog and pg_clog from the quota, I believe that
> failure to extend other tables would be reasonably graceful. Failure to
> extend the log files will cause a system stop, however. (The good news
> is that the sizes of the log file directories are fairly predictable.
> Log file segments are recycled when no longer needed, so the total space
> used doesn't really grow without bound, at least not in 7.2.)

Unless you make a typo in the where clause of a function and update half
a million rows 1200 times instead of 1200 rows out of half a million :(
It was one tranaction so the WAL grew to 312 segments before the
postmaster died due to a full /var/.

The good news, and shining example of the stability of PostgreSQL, was
that after a little space was freed PostgreSQL just restarted and
recycled all the WAL segments. Even dying is done gracefully by PostgreSQL.

Jochem