"scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com> writes:
> That said we have a really HUGE (~200 drive) IDE storage array my web /
> app server sits on top of. No clue if that thing will reliably work under
> a database, and I'm in no hurry to find out.
> But since the fsync on WAL is all that seems important, I could always
> initlocation a big chunk of it and keep the WAL local and I should be ok.
Unfortunately not --- at checkpoint time, the constraint goes the other
way. We have to be sure all the data file updates are down to disk
before we write a checkpoint record to the WAL log. So you can still
get screwed if the data-file drive lies about write completion.
regards, tom lane