On Thu, 5 Feb 2004, Rod Taylor wrote:
> > > Don't know. But apparently different users will have
> > > different demands From a database.
> >
> > Of course, but I would argue that my claim that PostgreSQL is reliable
> > is backed up by the lack of people posting messages like 'we had a
> > powercut and now my DB is hosed'.
>
> One thing we could use (and I have no idea how to do it) is a "This
> hardware is not appropriate for a database" test kit.
>
> Something to detect lying disks, battery backed write cache that isn't
> so battery backed, etc.
but I'm not sure you can test that without power off tests... so, it
would have to be a test that kinda started up then told you to pull the
plug on the box. Even a kernel panic wouldn't detect it because the drive
would still be powered up.
Or, you could have a test that checked what kind of drive it was (IDE
versus SCSI) and maybe had a table of drives that are known to lie,
possibly even by version, should drives of the same model stop lying half
way through production due to fixes in their firmware.
I'd guess it the table would still have to be built the old fashioned way,
by doing power off tests.