Re: NOLOGGING option, or ?

On Wed, 2005-06-01 at 14:14 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> So what I'm thinking is we need no special WAL entries for this.  What
> we need is just an operating mode of COPY in which it doesn't WAL-log
> its inserts, but instead fsyncs before completion, much like index build
> does.  For safety it must do all its inserts into freshly-added pages;
> this is not to ensure truncatability, because we aren't going to do that
> anyway, but to ensure that we don't have unlogged operations changing
> pages that might contain committed tuples. (That would pose a risk of
> losing committed data to incomplete writes in case of system crash
> partway through.  The same reason is why we need exclusive lock: else
> we might end up with pages containing a mix of logged and unlogged
> tuples.)  Also there can be no indexes, since we don't want index
> entries pointing to unlogged tuples.  And PITR can't be enabled.
> Otherwise no problem.

What you describe above is a coherent set of features that provide most
of the benefits I sought, plus some others. We also don't mess with WAL,
which is grand thing. We gain the ability to load into tables with rows
already in them.

I don't agree with all of your other points, but given time schedules, I
think that we win with the above, so forget the rest.

The main COPY/LOAD DATA discussion is on another thread of this from
Alon, who has some interesting ideas and some really cool performance
results to share.

Best Regards, Simon Riggs