Now that some of my recent writing has gone from NDA protected to public
sample, I've added a new page to the PostgreSQL wiki that provides a
good starting set of resources to learn about an ever popular topic
here, how write cache problems can lead to database corruption:
http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Reliable_Writes
Bruce also has a presentation he's been working on that adds pictures
showing the flow of data through the various cache levels, to help
people visualize the whole thing, that should get added into there once
he's finished tweaking it.
I'd like to get some feedback from the members of this list about what's
still missing after this expanded data dump. Ultimately I'd like to get
this page to be an authoritative enough resource that the "Reliability"
section of the official documentation could point back to this as a
recommendation for additional information. So much of this material
requires singling out specific vendors and staying up to date with
hardware changes, both things that the official docs are not a good
place for.
--
Greg Smith, 2ndQuadrant US greg@2ndQuadrant.com Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services and Support www.2ndQuadrant.us
Author, "PostgreSQL 9.0 High Performance":
http://www.2ndquadrant.com/books