Re: remove flatfiles.c

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: remove flatfiles.c
Date: 2009-09-01 13:58:43
Message-ID: 13589.1251813523@sss.pgh.pa.us
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Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> writes:
> VACUUM does so many things that I'd rather have it all safely on disk.
> I'd feel happier with the rule "VACUUM always sync commits", so we all
> remember it and can rely upon it to be the same from release to release.

Non-FULL vacuum has *never* done a sync commit, except in the unusual
corner case that it moves the database's datfrozenxid, which is a corner
case that didn't even exist until fairly recently. I think the argument
that we should have it force sync for no reason whatsoever is silly.
We get beat up on a regular basis about "spikes" in response time;
why would you want to have vacuum creating one when it doesn't need to?

As for the FULL case, the sync commit is to try to protect a horribly
unsafe kluge that should go away entirely (if vacuum full itself doesn't
go away entirely). That's hardly something I want to institutionalize
either.

regards, tom lane

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