Re: PG over NFS

There is GFS2, OCFS, DRBD, ENBD, iSCSI, AoE and a ton of other
technologies. What on earth is the point in trying to use a DBMS over
NFS? :)

In case it's just for the fun of it, maybe consider:
- davfs2
- curlftpfs

> However, I am primarily concerned with safety/recoverability (on sudden power loss);

Well then.. forget about NFS :) What about various replication solutions
like slony, 8.2 warm standby log shipping, mammoth replicator?

> must also assume the NFS server may lose power

A raid controller with battery backed cache and/or an UPS might be a
good start. If that's not an option disable all write caches or use a
filesystem that supports write barriers.


Yang wrote:
> This has been discussed before (some URLs below), but the threads have
> unfortunately been rather free of (precise) information. I am
> interested in getting PG running over NFS. However, I am primarily
> concerned with safety/recoverability (on sudden power loss); I care
> very, very little about the performance. Hence, I think this is a
> substantially simpler question to answer definitively (must also
> assume the NFS server may lose power). The particular NFS client and
> server implementations I'm using are the Linux NFS implementation
> (using kernel 2.6).
>
> If PG is unsuitable for this task, can any (preferrably open-source)
> alternatives be recommended? (Just for curiosity, consider any storage
> system supporting transactions and recovery, not necessarily the
> relational model or high performance.)
>
> BTW I've included some correspondence from my colleagues; I would also
> appreciate it if any corrections are offered to their statements (if
> necessary). From querying #postgresql on FreeNode, I gathered that as
> long as fsync works properly (flushes data to the server), there are
> no other concerns (and that there is in fact no file locking, except
> perhaps on the pid file).


--
Best regards,
Hannes Dorbath