Re: [HACKERS] Checksums by default?

Peter,

* Peter Geoghegan (pg@heroku.com) wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 1:22 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com> wrote:
> > I understand that my experience with storage devices is unusually
> > narrow compared to everyone else here. That's why I remain neutral on
> > the high level question of whether or not we ought to enable checksums
> > by default. I'll ask other hackers to answer what may seem like a very
> > naive question, while bearing what I just said in mind. The question
> > is: Have you ever actually seen a checksum failure in production? And,
> > if so, how helpful was it?
>
> I'm surprised that nobody has answered my question yet.
>
> I'm not claiming that not actually seeing any corruption in the wild
> due to a failing checksum invalidates any argument. I *do* think that
> data points like this can be helpful, though.

Sadly, without having them enabled by default, there's not a huge corpus
of example cases to draw from.

There have been a few examples already posted about corruption failures
with PG, but one can't say with certainty that they would have been
caught sooner if checksums had been enabled.

Thanks!

Stephen