Re: unlogged tables

On Wed, Dec 8, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 13:17 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> > I'm also going to go through and change all instances of the word
>> > "unlogged" to "volatile", per previous discussion.  If this seems like
>> > a bad idea to anyone, please object now rather than afterwards.
>>
>> Hm... I thought there had been discussion of a couple of different
>> flavors of table volatility.  Is it really a good idea to commandeer
>> the word "volatile" for this particular one?
>
> Note that DB2 uses the table modifier VOLATILE to indicate a table that
> has a widely fluctuating table size, for example a queue table. It's
> used as a declarative optimizer hint. So the term has many possible
> meanings.
>
> Prefer UNLOGGED or similar descriptive term.

Hrm. The previous consensus seemed to be in favor of trying to
describe the behavior (your contents might disappear) rather than the
implementation (we don't WAL-log those contents). However, the fact
that DB2 uses that word to mean something entirely different is
certainly a bit awkward, so maybe we should reconsider. Or maybe not.
I'm not sure. Anyone else want to weigh in here?

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company