On Tue, Oct 08, 2002 at 12:35:22PM +0200, Erwan DUROSELLE wrote:
> What I understood from the Administrator's guide is:
>
> - Yes, PostgreSQL provides hot backup: it's the pg_dump utility. It'h
> hot because users can still be connected and work whil pg_dump is running
> ( though they will be slowed down). ( See Administrator's guide ch9)
Correct.
> - No, PostgreSQL does NOT provide a way to restore a database up to the
> last commited transaction, with a reapply of the WAL, as Oracle or SQL
> Server ( and others, I guess) do. That would be a VERY good feature. See
> Administrator's guide ch11
Umm, I thought the whole point of WAL was that if the database crashed, the
WAL would provide the info to replay to the last committed transaction.
http://www.postgresql.org/idocs/index.php?wal.html
... because we know that in the event of a crash we will be able to recover
the database using the log: ...
These docs seem to corrobrate this.
> So, with Pg, if you backup your db every night with pg_dump, and your
> server crashes during the day, you will loose up to one day of work.
I've never lost any data with postgres, even if it's crashed, even without
WAL.
--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/
> There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that can do binary
> arithmetic and those that can't.
