Re: unlogged tables

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>

From: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Kenneth Marshall <ktm@rice.edu>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Heikki Linnakangas <heikki.linnakangas@enterprisedb.com>, marcin mank <marcin.mank@gmail.com>, Andy Colson <andy@squeakycode.net>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2010-11-17T19:53:10Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

On 11/17/2010 02:44 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
> [ forgot to comment on this part ]
>
> Andrew Dunstan<andrew@dunslane.net>  writes:
>> 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.
> Well, if you mean the postmaster darn near never goes down, that's true,
> because we go out of our way to ensure it does as little as possible.
> But that has got zip to do with this discussion, because a backend crash
> has to be assumed to have corrupted unlogged tables.  There are some
> folk over in -general who are wishfully thinking that only a postmaster
> crash would lose their unlogged data, but that's simply wrong.  Backend
> crashes *will* truncate those tables; there is no way around that.  The
> comment I made was that my experience as to how often backends crash
> might not square with production experience --- but you do have to draw
> the distinction between a backend crash and a postmaster crash.

OK. I'd missed that. Thanks for clarifying.

cheers

andrew