> AFAICS there are no circumstances, ever, in which update-in-place is
> "safe". (No transaction can guarantee that it will commit.)
In our case, it is totally safe. I'd certainly like to discuss it
with you sometime at the anniversary.
> Martin's proposal at least looks sensible; he just hasn't quite made the
> case that it's worth doing ... I agree that it likely would never be the
> default. But it could be a good tradeoff for some cases.
I guess I can think of a few instances, but none that I would've
chosen to use it in. IIRC, it's also more likely to increase the cost
of checkpointing and/or require a good amount of bgwriter tuning.
As long as it's optional, I guess it's OK to let the administrator
deal with recovery. Of course, in addition to no-fsync, we'll have
another *possibly* dangerous option. BTW, I've seen no-fsync used far
too many times because people think they're hardware is invincible.
My only suggestion is to make sure it's a very well documented option.
--
Jonah H. Harris, Database Internals Architect
EnterpriseDB Corporation
732.331.1324