On 01/15/2014 06:01 AM, Jim Nasby wrote:
> For the sake of completeness... it's theoretically silly that Postgres
> is doing all this stuff with WAL when the filesystem is doing something
> very similar with it's journal. And an SSD drive (and next generation
> spinning rust) is doing the same thing *again* in it's own journal.
>
> If all 3 communities (or even just 2 of them!) could agree on the
> necessary interface a tremendous amount of this duplicated technology
> could be eliminated.
>
> That said, I rather doubt the Postgres community would go this route,
> not so much because of the presumably massive changes needed, but more
> because our community is not a fan of restricting our users to things
> like "Thou shalt use a journaled FS or risk all thy data!"
The WAL is also used for continuous archiving and replication, not just
crash recovery. We could skip full-page-writes, though, if we knew that
the underlying filesystem/storage is guaranteeing that a write() is atomic.
It might be useful for PostgreSQL somehow tell the filesystem that we're
taking care of WAL-logging, so that the filesystem doesn't need to.
- Heikki
