Re: Possible causes for database corruption and solutions

On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 2:05 PM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:

> Michael Clark wrote:
>
> On Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 11:25 AM, Greg Smith <greg(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Florian Weimer wrote:
>>
>>> I hope that Mac OS X turns off write caches on low battery.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> I've never heard of such a thing. The best you can do is try to push the
>> system into hibernation instead of going down hard. That *should* clear any
>> disk caches as part of the graceful shutdown. But you're relying on a
>> relatively fragile system now, once the battery is quite low who knows if
>> that will even execute in the window of time you have left.
>>
>>
> And at this point it is not unreasonable to expect the user to perform
> some sort of action. Shutdown before the power completely dies, or plug in
> the power.
>
>
> Sure, but the point is that if your database will get corrupted if that
> doesn't happen, that's a mistake because sooner or later every such portable
> system is going to end up there and not get plugged in on time.
>

Totally agree, not having PG setup properly and expecting the user to not
fall into this problem is irresponsible.

I was speaking more generally on the OS level. How aggressive should we
expect an OS to be in a case like this where some responsibility should lie
with the user.