Re: [PATCHES] O_DIRECT for WAL writes

Gavin Sherry <swm(at)linuxworld(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
>> Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> writes:
>>> But is it really a problem? I somewhere got the impression that some
>>> drives, on power failure, will be able to keep going for long enough to
>>> write out the cache and park the heads anyway. If so, the drive is still
>>> guaranteeing the write.

> I've seen discussion about disks behaving this way. There's no magic:
> they're battery backed.

Oh, sure, then it's easy ;-)

The bottom line here seems to be the same as always: you can't run an
industrial strength database on piece-of-junk consumer grade hardware.
Our problem is that because the software is free, people expect to run
it on bottom-of-the-line Joe Bob's Bait And PC Shack hardware, and then
they blame us when they don't get the same results as the guy running
Oracle on million-dollar triply-redundant server hardware. Oh well.

regards, tom lane