Re: postgres crash SOS

On Thu, Jun 17, 2010 at 2:53 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> You weren't too specific about how you got into this state, but I
> suppose that it must have been a system crash or power failure.  Even
> then, you would not have gotten burnt if the filesystem and hardware
> did what they're supposed to do.  I suspect you have a setup wherein
> fsync() calls aren't being honored properly.  You may need to disable
> write caching on your disks, and/or switch to another filesystem or OS.
> (Personally I'd never run a database I cared about on Windows.)

Although I don't run pg/windows anymore, I did for years and I think
you're right -- I bet there was a hard reset event and either fsync
was off or not being honored properly. I was communicating with the
OP off list to see if there was any evidence of disk full condition
(no response yet). I never saw any data corruption in line with this
w/o some external trigger.

In regards to windows/pg generally, I don't think it's all that bad.
The windows NT kernel is absolutely rock solid stable (quite frankly,
moreso than linux IMO) and very well supported in terms of hardaware.
otoh, windows kernel configuration is wacky, the shell sucks, insanely
overdesigned security model, posix not really supported, etc. It's a
mixed bag for sure.

merlin