Re: Enabling Checksums - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Sun, Mar 17, 2013 at 05:50:11PM -0700, Greg Smith wrote:
> As long as the feature is off by default, so that people have to
> turn it on to hit the biggest changed code paths, the exposure to
> potential bugs doesn't seem too bad.  New WAL data is no fun, but
> it's not like this hasn't happened before.

With a potential 10-20% overhead, I am unclear who would enable this at
initdb time.

I assume a user would wait until they suspected corruption to turn it
on, and because it is only initdb-enabled, they would have to
dump/reload their cluster.  The open question is whether this is a
usable feature as written, or whether we should wait until 9.4.

pg_upgrade can't handle this because the old/new clusters would have the
same catalog version number and the tablespace directory names would
conflict.  Even if they are not using tablespaces, the old heap/index
files would not have checksums and therefore would throw an error as
soon as you accessed them.  In fact, this feature is going to need
pg_upgrade changes to detect from pg_controldata that the old/new
clusters have the same checksum setting.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +