Re: [HACKERS] Checksums by default?

On Mon, Jan 23, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Peter Geoghegan <pg@heroku.com> writes:
>> I thought that checksums went in in part because we thought that there
>> was some chance that they'd find bugs in Postgres.
>
> Not really.  AFAICS the only point is to catch storage-system malfeasance.
>
> It's barely possible that checksumming would help detect cases where
> we'd written data meant for block A into block B, but I don't rate
> that as being significantly more probable than bugs in the checksum
> code itself.  Also, if that case did happen, the checksum code might
> "detect" it in some sense, but it would be remarkably unhelpful at
> identifying the actual cause.

Hm, but at least in some cases wouldn't it protect people from further
damage?  End user data damage ought to prevented at all costs IMO.

merlin