Re: Changing the state of data checksums in a running cluster

On Wed, Jul 3, 2024 at 01:20:10PM +0200, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> > * Restartability - the initial version of the patch did not support stateful
> > restarts, a shutdown performed (or crash) before checksums were enabled would
> > result in a need to start over from the beginning. This was deemed the safe
> > orchestration method. The lack of this feature was seen as serious drawback,
> > so it was added. Subsequent review instead found the patch to be too
> > complicated with a too large featureset. I thihk there is merit to both of
> > these arguments: being able to restart is a great feature; and being able to
> > reason about the correctness of a smaller patch is also great. As of this
> > submission I have removed the ability to restart to keep the scope of the patch
> > small (which is where the previous version was, which received no review after
> > the removal). The way I prefer to frame this is to first add scaffolding and
> > infrastructure (this patch) and leave refinements and add-on features
> > (restartability, but also others like parallel workers, optimizing rare cases,
> > etc) for follow-up patches.
> >
>
> I 100% support this approach.

Yes, I was very disappointed when restartability sunk the patch, and I
saw this as another case where saying "yes" to every feature improvement
can lead to failure.

--
Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> https://momjian.us
EDB https://enterprisedb.com

Only you can decide what is important to you.