Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of vie ene 14 00:03:53 -0300 2011:
> On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 8:28 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > True. It strikes me also that the postmaster does provide some services
> > other than accepting new connections:
> >
> > * ensuring that everybody gets killed if a backend crashes
> > While you could probably live without these in the scenario of "let my
> > honking big query finish before restarting", you would not want to do
> > without them in unattended operation.
>
> Yep. I'm pretty doubtful that you're going to want them even in that
> case, but you're surely not going to want them in unattended
> operation.
I'm sure you don't want that. The reason postmaster causes a restart of
all backends in case one of them crashes is that it could have left some
corrupted state behind. If postmaster dies, and then another backend
crashes, then your backend running "your honking big query" could run
across corrupted state and then you'd be in serious trouble.
--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
The PostgreSQL Company - Command Prompt, Inc.
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support
