Re: kill -KILL: What happens?

Florian Pflug <fgp@phlo.org> writes:
> I don't believe there's one right answer to that.

Right.  Force-kill presumes there is only one right answer.

> Assume postgres is driving a website, and the postmaster crashes shortly
> after a pg_dump run started. You probably won't want your website to be
> offline while pg_dump is finishing its backup.

> If, on the other hand, your data warehousing database is running a
> multi-hour query, you might prefer that query to finish, even at the price
> of not being able to accept new connections.

> So maybe there should be a GUC for this?

No need (and rather inflexible anyway).  If you don't want an orphaned
backend to continue, you send it SIGTERM.
        regards, tom lane