>> Very true. But the lack of a -1 setting for wal_keep_segments means
>> that if you would like to take a backup without archiving, you must
>> set wal_keep_segments to a value greater than or equal to the rate at
>> which you generate WAL segments multiplied by the time it takes you to
>> run a backup. If that doesn't qualify as requiring arcane knowledge,
>> I'm mystified as to what ever could.
Speaking of which, what's the relationship between checkpoint_segments
and wal_keep_segments? PG seems perfectly willing to let me set the
latter higher than the former, and it's not documented.
If checkpoint_segments were a hard limit, then we could let admins set
wal_keep_segments to -1, knowing that they'd set checkpoint_segments to
the max space they had available.
Although we might want to rename those.
-- -- Josh Berkus PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://www.pgexperts.com