Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: > Because I see having checksums as, frankly, something we always should > have had (as most other databases do, for good reason...) and because > they will hopefully prevent data loss. I'm willing to give us a fair > bit to minimize the risk of losing data.
To be perfectly blunt, that's just magical thinking. Checksums don't prevent data loss in any way, shape, or form. In fact, they can *cause* data loss, or at least make it harder for you to retrieve your data, in the event of bugs causing false-positive checksum failures. What checksums can do for you, perhaps, is notify you in a reasonably timely fashion if you've already lost data due to storage-subsystem problems. But in a pretty high percentage of cases, that fact would be extremely obvious anyway, because of visible data corruption. I think the only really clear benefit accruing from checksums is that they make it easier to distinguish storage-subsystem failures from Postgres bugs. That can certainly be a benefit to some users, but I remain dubious that the average user will find it worth any noticeable amount of overhead. regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers