On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>
> I don't really see much vagueness there. FATAL is an unexpected but
> orderly shutdown. PANIC is for the situations where we can't handle the
> problem that occurred in any orderly way.
Sorry, I was unclear. I meant that without context if someone asked
you which was more severe, "fatal" or "panic" you would have no
particular way to know. After all, for a person it's easier to cure a
panic than a fatality :)
On the client end the FATAL is pretty logical but in the logs it makes
it sound like the entire server died. Especially in this day of
multithreaded servers. I was suggesting that that was the origin of
the confusion here. Anyone who has seen these messages on the client
end many times might interpret them correctly in the server logs but
someone who has only been a DBA, not a database user might never have
seen them except in the server logs and without the context might not
realize that FATAL is a term of art peculiar to Postgres.
--
greg