Re: [Bizgres-general] WAL bypass for INSERT, UPDATE and

Qingqing Zhou <zhouqq@cs.toronto.edu>

From: "Qingqing Zhou" <zhouqq@cs.toronto.edu>
To: pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2005-12-23T00:53:04Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote
> "Qingqing Zhou" <zhouqq@cs.toronto.edu> writes:
>> BEGIN TRANSACTION WITHOUT XLOG;    /* forbidden vacuum, PITR etc */
>
>> So during this peroid, if any transaction failed, the only consequence is
>> add invisible garbage data.
>
> No, the likely consequence is irretrievable corruption of any table or
> index page touched by the transaction.
>

I guess I know (at least part) of what you mean. This is because we rely on 
replay all the xlog no matter it belongs to a committed transaction or not. 
Why? Because a failed transaction is not totally useless since later 
transaction may reply on some physical thing it creates - for example, a new 
page and its links of a btree. So for heap, there is(95% sure) no such 
problem. Our heap redo algorithm can automatically add empty pages to a 
heap. For index, there are problems, but I suspect they are solvable by not 
bypassing these records ... if this is not totally-nonstarter, I will 
investigate details of how to do it.

Regards,
Qingqing