Re: Enabling Checksums

Heikki,

> Perhaps we should just wait a few years? If we suspect that this becomes
> obsolete in a few years, it's probably better to just wait, than add a
> feature we'll have to keep maintaining. Assuming it gets committed
> today, it's going to take a year or two for 9.3 to get released and all
> the bugs ironed out, anyway.

You are far more optimistic about FS development than I am:

* Windows and OSX are unlikely to ever have usable FS checksums
* BTRFS may be years away from being production-quality for DB server,
and (given the current dev priorities) may *never* be suitable for DB
servers.
* For various reasons, many users may stay with other filesystems, even
on Linux.
* All filesystems have bugs, and the FS may be itself causing the
corruption.
* FS checksums may not catch underlying driver bugs (i.e. better to have
two checks than one if you KNOW something is wrong)

We have people who could use PostgreSQL-level checksums *now* because
they are having data corruption issues *now* and need a tool to help
determine what layer the corruption is occurring at.

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