Mike Castle <dalgoda@ix.netcom.com> writes:
> Another point of concern is state of the system when a backup is taken.
> Other threads pointed out the concern about backing up files during the
> middle of transactions and the like. Better if able to ask the LVM layer
> (or whatever) to take a snapshot, and then back THAT up. Does netapp offer
> such facilities? (I would imagine so, but not positive). If not, one may
> still have to do a pg_dump just to maintain stable backups.
I don't think that LVM (or snapshots in general, which NetApps do
indeed offer) will help without a way to tell PG to quiesce itself and
flush all caches to disk. A random snapshot of a PG database will
almost certainly not be consistent.
I don't think PG has anything like Oracle's "hot backup" mode, except
for pg_dump itself.
-Doug
