I recently read our documentation about reliability on Windows: > On Windows, if wal_sync_method is open_datasync (the default), write caching > can > be disabled by unchecking > My Computer\Open\disk drive\Properties\Hardware\Properties\Policies\Enable > write caching > on the disk. Alternatively, set wal_sync_method to fsync or > fsync_writethrough, > which prevent write caching.
It seems dangerous to me to initialize "wal_sync_method" to a method that is unsafe by default. Admittedly I am not a Windows man, but the fact that this has eluded me up to now leads me to believe that other people running PostgreSQL on Windows might also have missed that important piece of advice and are consequently running with an unsafe setup. Wouldn't it be smarter to set a different default value on Windows, like we do on Linux (for other reasons)? I am worried that there might be loads of Windows installations out there happily running productive databases with an unsafe setup, so I'd even suggest backpatching such a change. Yours, Laurenz Albe
