RE: WAL questions

> Vadim is the man who ought to answer this (and he's on the
> hook to write a lot of documentation before 7.1 ships ;-)).
> But my understanding is that as of 7.1, WAL will not really
> provide any user-level features like audit trails or
> point-in-time recovery. The only useful thing it does right
> now is reduce the cost of fsyncs.

and protects against
  - non-atomic disk writes (eg partially written page cleaned
    up by vacuum);
  - losing tuples in btree split (first step on the way to
    stable indices)

> It provides an infrastructure on which we can build audit
> trails etc in future releases --- but the superstructure
> atop this infrastructure ain't there yet.

Exactly.

BTW, WAL related questions should be posted to -hackers list.
-general is not for discussion of upcoming releases.

Vadim