Re: NOLOGGING option, or ?

Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>

From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu>, Neil Conway <neilc@samurai.com>, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@surnet.cl>, Simon Riggs <simon@2ndquadrant.com>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2005-06-01T23:02:17Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us> writes:
> > One idea would be to look at the table file size first.  If it has zero
> > blocks, lock the table and if it still has zero blocks, do the no-WAL
> > copy.
> 
> I think that's a bad idea.  It would make the behavior unpredictable
> --- sometimes a COPY will take an exclusive lock, and other times not;
> and the reason why is at a lower semantic level than the user is
> supposed to know about.
> 
> Before you say "this is not important", consider the nontrivial risk
> that the stronger lock will cause a deadlock failure.  I don't think
> that it's acceptable for lock strength to be unpredictable.

Yea, but you are only doing the lock if the table is zero pages. 
Doesn't that help?  Maybe not.

I do like the LOCK keyword if we have to use one to enable this
functionality, but I am suspecting people will want this functionality
in pg_dump output.  How do we do that?  Just make it the default for
pg_dump output?

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