Re: [PATCHES] O_DIRECT for WAL writes

On Thu, 23 Jun 2005, Tom Lane wrote:

> Gavin Sherry <swm(at)linuxworld(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
> >> Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> writes:
> >>> But is it really a problem? I somewhere got the impression that some
> >>> drives, on power failure, will be able to keep going for long enough to
> >>> write out the cache and park the heads anyway. If so, the drive is still
> >>> guaranteeing the write.
>
> > I've seen discussion about disks behaving this way. There's no magic:
> > they're battery backed.
>
> Oh, sure, then it's easy ;-)
>
> The bottom line here seems to be the same as always: you can't run an
> industrial strength database on piece-of-junk consumer grade hardware.
> Our problem is that because the software is free, people expect to run
> it on bottom-of-the-line Joe Bob's Bait And PC Shack hardware, and then
> they blame us when they don't get the same results as the guy running
> Oracle on million-dollar triply-redundant server hardware. Oh well.

If you ever need a second job, I recommend stand up comedy :-).

Gavin