Re: Safe to delete archived log files generated by ongoing transaction?

Mitchell Bösecke wrote:
> I have a long running transaction (> 24 hours) running on a development machine and so far it's
> generated more than 50 gigs of log files which are being archived to another disk. That disk is
> starting to run low and I'm wondering if deleting these logs will affect the ongoing transaction at
> all? I.e. does a commit or a rollback require access to the original transaction logs?

The database server will not be affected if you delete the WAL archives.

> The postgresql instance is version 9.2, the base backup was generated using the pg_basebackup utility
> with the "--xlog" parameter so if necessary I should also be able to recover without the use of those
> log files, correct?

However, you will lose the ability to do point-in-time recovery.

So if you have such a backup, you can restore it, but you will lose the
ability to replay any of the changes that happened since.

Yours,
Laurenz Albe