Re: Worries about delayed-commit semantics

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Tom Lane wrote:

> What's wrong with synchronous_commit?  It's accurate and simple.

It's kind of a big word that not a lot of people understand the subtleties 
of, and I'd be concerned it will sow confusion with the terminology used 
for WAL synchronous writes.

When I explain to people the difference between transactions that have 
just been committed and written to disk (but possibly still sitting in a 
buffer) vs. ones that are known to have made it all the way through to the 
platters via fsync, the word I use is that the writes have been confirmed. 
If I were picking a GUC name to describe the current behavior I'd want to 
call it "confirmed_commit=on".  I think people easily understand the idea 
that just because something wasn't confirmed, that doesn't mean it didn't 
happen, you just can't be sure--and therefore there's a possibility it 
could be lost.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith@gregsmith.com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD