Re: Enabling Checksums

Jeff,

> OK, so here's my proposal for a first patch (changes from Simon's
> patch):
>
> * Add a flag to the postgres executable indicating that it should use
> checksums on everything. This would only be valid if bootstrap mode is
> also specified.
> * Add a multi-state checksums flag in pg_control, that would have
> three states: OFF, ENABLING, and ON. It would only be set to ON during
> bootstrap, and in this first patch, it would not be possible to set
> ENABLING.
> * Remove GUC and use this checksums flag everywhere.
> * Use the TLI field rather than the version field of the page header.
> * Incorporate page number into checksum calculation (already done).
>
> Does this satisfy the requirements for a first step? Does it interfere
> with potential future work?

So the idea of this implementation is that checksums is something you
set at initdb time, and if you want checksums on an existing database,
it's a migration process (e.g. dump and reload)?

I think that's valid as a first cut at this.

We'll need interruptable VACUUM CHECKSUM later, but we don't have to
have it for the first version of the feature.

--
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com