Re: Using of --data-checksums

On 4/12/20 07:23, Tom Lane wrote:
> Magnus Hagander <magnus@hagander.net> writes:
>> And FWIW, I do think we should change the default. And maybe spend some
>> extra effort on the message coming out of pg_upgrade in this case to make
>> it clear to people what their options are and exactly what to do.
> 
> Is there any hard evidence of checksums catching problems at all?
> Let alone in sufficient number to make them be on-by-default?

Data checksums are a hard requirement across the entire RDS PostgreSQL
fleet - we do not allow it to be disabled in RDS. I've definitely seen a
lot of hard evidence (for example, customer cases I've personally been
involved in) that it catches problems. I could not exaggerate how useful
and important I think this feature is: being able to very quickly and
easily know that a problem originated outside of the PostgreSQL code.
This was in part what led to that long blog article I wrote about
checksums, and it's why enabling checksums was happiness hint #1 until I
broke them into categories.

FWIW, I also strongly agree that checksums should be enabled by default
in the git.postgresql.org code.

-Jeremy


-- 
Jeremy Schneider
Database Engineer
Amazon Web Services