Re: Initdb --data-checksums by default

On 20 April 2016 at 14:43, Alex Ignatov <a(dot)ignatov(at)postgrespro(dot)ru> wrote:
> Hello everyone!
> Today in Big Data epoch silent data corruption becoming more and more issue
> to afraid of. With uncorrectable read error rate ~ 10^-15 on multiterabyte
> disk bit rot is the real issue.
> I think that today checksumming data must be mandatory set by default.
> Only if someone doesn't care about his data he can manually turn this option
> off.
>
> What do you think about defaulting --data-checksums in initdb?

I think --data-checksums should default to on.

Databases created 'thoughtlessly' should have safe defaults. Operators
creating databases with care can elect to disable it if they are
redundant in their environment, if they cannot afford the overhead, or
consider their data low value enough to not want to pay the overheads.

If the performance impact is deemed unacceptable, perhaps the ability
to turn them off on an existing database is easily doable (a one way
operation).

--
Stuart Bishop <stuart(at)stuartbishop(dot)net>
http://www.stuartbishop.net/