Re: unlogged tables

On 11/17/2010 02:22 PM, Kenneth Marshall wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 02:16:06PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Robert Haas<robertmhaas@gmail.com>  writes:
>>> On Wed, Nov 17, 2010 at 1:46 PM, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>  wrote:
>>>> Robert is probably going to object that he wanted to prevent any
>>>> fsyncing for unlogged tables, but the discussion over in pgsql-general
>>>> is crystal clear that people do NOT want to lose unlogged data over
>>>> a clean shutdown and restart. �If all it takes to do that is to refrain
>>>> from lobotomizing the checkpoint logic for unlogged tables, I say we
>>>> should refrain.
>>> I think that's absolutely a bad idea.
>> The customer is always right, and I think we are hearing loud and clear
>> what the customers want.  Please let's not go out of our way to create
>> a feature that isn't what they want.
> I would be fine with only having a safe shutdown with unlogged tables
> and skip the checkpoint I/O all other times.

Yeah, I was just thinking something like that would be good, and should 
overcome Robert's objection to the whole idea.

I also agree with Tom's sentiment above.

To answer another point I see Tom made on the -general list: while 
individual backends may crash from time to time, crashes of the whole 
Postgres server are very rare in my experience in production 
environments. It's really pretty robust, unless you're doing crazy 
stuff. So that makes it all the more important that we can restart a 
server cleanly (say, to change a config setting) without losing the 
unlogged tables. If we don't allow that we'll make a laughing stock of 
ourselves. Honestly.

cheers

andrew