On Mon, 2002-08-12 at 11:04, Andrew Sullivan wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 12, 2002 at 11:44:24AM -0400, Lamar Owen wrote:
> > keep discussing the issues involved, and I'll see what comes of it. I don't
> > have an direct experience with the largefile support, and am learning as I go
> > with this.
>
> I do have experience with both of these cases. We're hosted in a
> managed-hosting environment, and one day one of the sysadmins there
> must've remounted a filesystem without largefile support. Poof! I
> started getting all sorts of strange pg_dump problems. It wasn't
> hard to track down, except that I was initially surprised by the
> errors, since I'd just _enabled_ large file support.
And, what if he just remounted it read only. Mistakes will happen.
That doesn't come across as being a strong argument to me. Besides,
it's doubtful that a filesystem is going to be remounted while it's in
use. Which means, these issues are going to be secondary to actual
product use of the database. That is, either the system is working
correctly or it's not. If it's not, guess it's not ready for production
use.
Furthermore, since fs mounting, if being done properly, is almost always
a matter of automation, this particular class of error should be few and
very far between.
Wouldn't you rather answer people with, "remount your file system",
rather than, recompile with such-n-such option enabled, reinstall. Oh
ya, since you're re-installing a modified version of your database,
probably a good paranoid option would be to back up and dump, just to be
safe. Personally, I'd rather say, "remount".
> There are, in any case, _lots_ of problems with these large files.
> You not only need to make sure that pg_dump and friends can support
> files bigger than 2G. You need to make sure that you can move the
> files around (your file transfer commands), that you can compress the
> files (how is gzip compiled? bzip2?), and even that you r backup
> software takes the large file. In a few years, when all
> installations are ready for this, it seems like it'd be a good idea
> to turn this on by default. Right now, I think the risks are at
> least as great as those incurred by telling people they need to
> recompile.
>
All of those are SA issues. Shouldn't we leave that domain of issues
for a SA to deal with rather than try to force a single view down
someone's throat? Which, btw, results is creating more work for those
that desire this feature.
Greg