Unlogged tables

Hello,

We have a fairly large static dataset that we load into Postgres. We made the tables UNLOGGED and saw a pretty significant performance improvement for the loading. This was all fantastic until the server crashed and we were surprised to see during a follow up demo that the data had disappeared... Of course, it's all our fault for not understanding the implications of UNLOGGED proprely.

However, our scenario is truly a set of tables with 100's of millions of rows that are effectively WORMs: we write them once only, and then only read from them afterwards. As such, they could not be possibly corrupted post-load (i think) during a server crash (short of physical disk defects...).

I'd like to have the performance improvement during a initial batch insert, and then make sure the table remains after "unclean" shutdowns, which, as you might have it, includes a regular Windows server shut down during patching for example. So unlogged tables in practice are pretty flimsy. I tried to ALTER ... SET LOGGED, but that takes a VERY long time and pretty much negates the initial performance boost of loading into an unlogged table.

Is there a way to get my cake and eat it too?

Thank you,

Laurent Hasson