Re: Enabling Checksums

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 4:44 AM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> That'll make it hard for VACUUM, hint-bit setting, etc to
> opportunistically checksum pages whenever they're doing a page write anyway.
>
> Is it absurd to suggest using another bitmap, like the FSM or visibility
> map, to store information on page checksumming while checksumming is
> enabled but incomplete? As a much smaller file the bitmap could its self
> be very quickly generated in one pass when checksumming is enabled, with
> its starting state showing no pages having checksums.

Hmm... what if we took this a step further and actually stored the
checksums in a separate relation fork?  That would make it pretty
simple to support enabling/disabling checksums for particular
relations.  It would also allow us to have a wider checksum, like 32
or 64 bits rather than 16.  I'm not scoffing at a 16-bit checksum,
because even that's enough to catch a very high percentage of errors,
but it wouldn't be terrible to be able to support a wider one, either.

-- 
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
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