Re: Detecting corrupted pages earlier

On Wed, Apr 02, 2003 at 03:25:58PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:

> the current session.  This is kind of an ugly wart on the GUC mechanism,
> but I think not difficult to do with an assign_hook (it just has to
> refuse non-interactive settings).

It may be an ugly wart, but I think it's only prudent.  I'd be
willing to bet a fair amount that there is a significant overlap
between the population which uses Bob's Discount Hardware for 10
million row, ultra-critical databases and the population which likes
to twiddle postgresql.conf settings without reading the fine
manual.  Those folks are going to get burned by this setting unless
it is very hard to turn on.  (I think the setting is an excellent
idea, though, for emergency cases.)

I don't usually like making servers totally idiot-proof, but I can
just imagine the Slashdot conversations after 7.4 comes out (and for
at least 60 or 70 years thereafter): "PostgreSQL just randomly zeroes
a page of data!  It sucks!  Use MySQL instead.  It can recover from
bad pages on your disk by randomly making up data for you, instead of
just writing zeros."

A

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