Re: XFS File systems and PostgreSQL

Dear Bruce,
> 
> Yes, the irony is that a journaling file system is being used to have
> fast, reliable restore after crash bootup, but with no fsync, the db is
> probably hosed.

There is no irony in these cases. In my systems, which are used for
bioinformatics, the updating process is generally restartable. I
normally have lots of data to load or many records to change,
and the quantities are much more than any reasonable
sized transaction. Some jobs run for days. If I lose some data
because of a crash, I just restart the jobs, and they'll delete some
of the last data to be loaded, and then resume. Furthermore, the SGI's
that I run on are highly reliable, and they rarely crash. So, I might
have to clean up a big mess rarely (I've had one really big one in
two years), but performance otherwise is really good. I should
also point out that most of my work has been with PostgreSQL 6.5.3
which doesn't have the WAL.

If I have some time, I will try the experiment of loading a database
of mine into PG 7.1 using -F or not and I'll report the timing.

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