On Wed, 17 Sep 2003, Tom Lane wrote:
> "scott.marlowe" <scott.marlowe@ihs.com> writes:
> > Not so sure on whether the foot gun is a good idea. We already have .22
> > calibre foot gun (fsync) that makes for pretty big improvements in load
> > speed, and we see people all the time on General and Performance running
> > production servers with it turned off. You know as well as I do the
> > second we make WAL optional, some people are gonna start running
> > production servers with it.
>
> Well, yeah, they will. On a noncritical server, is that a sin? I mean,
> if we offer fsync-off, it's not clear to me that offering WAL-off makes
> the difference between venial and mortal sin. Seems to me we're just
> putting the weapons in the display case. fsync = .22, WAL = .45,
> but you shoot your foot with either one it's still gonna ruin your day.
Now that you mention it, there are some areas where no WAL makes sense,
like proxy caching data stores and such, where errors aren't critical
because you can just grab the original data.
Postgresql, now with MySQL data integrity mode. :-)