Re: Renaming of pg_xlog and pg_clog - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Joshua D. Drake
Subject Re: Renaming of pg_xlog and pg_clog
Date
Msg-id 597971b8-5b35-82fc-7b64-ee42afbdc342@commandprompt.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Renaming of pg_xlog and pg_clog  ("Daniel Verite" <daniel@manitou-mail.org>)
Responses Re: Renaming of pg_xlog and pg_clog  ("Daniel Verite" <daniel@manitou-mail.org>)
List pgsql-hackers
On 08/29/2016 06:42 AM, Daniel Verite wrote:
>
> Aside from that, we might also question how much of the excuse
> "pg_xlog looked like it was just deletable logs" is a lie made up
> after the fact, because anybody wrecking a database is not against
> deflecting a bit of the blame to the software, that's human.
>
> The truth being that they took the gamble that postgres
> will somehow recover from the deletion, at the risk of possibly
> loosing the latest transactions. That doesn't necessarily look
> so bad when current transactions are failing anyway for lack of disk
> space, users are yelling at you, and you're frantically searching for
> anything to delete in the FS to come back online quickly.
> Personally I'm quite skeptical of the *name* of the directory
> playing that much of a role in this scenario.

Oh it makes perfect sense.

User who isn't a postgres/database person installs X software. X 
software uses PostgreSQL and you have read on the intertubes about how 
Postgres is awesome. So you install it, get everything up and running 
from the README.md on Github. You walk away.

A year later, after it becomes crucial to whatever it is you do the 
system crashes. You have no idea what is going on, you just set this up 
on some recycled server or VM. You log in, see that all the space and 
you find that you are using a ton of disk space. You look around for 
anything you can delete. You find a directory called pg_xlog, it says 
log, junior ignorant, don't want to be a sysadmin 101 says, "delete logs".

Boom, crushed server. Let us not forget that by far the number of 
PostgreSQL users we have, have never done ANYTHING with postgres except 
make it so something like Drupal can connect to it.

JD




>
> Best regards,
>


-- 
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