Effect of a kill -9 on postgres

Hi all,

A few days ago one of our postgres (8.3.12) servers was a bit unhappy, and someone decided to try a kill -9 on a backend process after a kill (TERM) was ineffective. I've read many times in the past that a kill -9 can be pretty hazardous to a postgres' health, and now it seems I get to see first hand how hazardous it really is :(

Fortunately postgres seems to have detected the -9 signal and brought the system down:

2011-08-05 17:17:53 EST redacted.com 10.3.0.3(39556) admin(at)redacted(dot)com WARNING: terminating connection because of crash of another server process
2011-08-05 17:17:53 EST redacted.com 10.3.0.3(39556) admin(at)redacted(dot)com DETAIL: The postmaster has commanded this server process to roll back the current transaction and exit, because another server process exited abnormally and possibly corrupted shared memory.
2011-08-05 17:17:53 EST redacted.com 10.3.0.3(39556) admin(at)redacted(dot)com HINT: In a moment you should be able to reconnect to the database and repeat your command.

After the barrage of those messages, there:

2011-08-05 17:17:54 EST LOG: all server processes terminated; reinitializing
2011-08-05 17:17:55 EST LOG: database system was interrupted; last known up at 2011-08-05 17:15:33 EST
2011-08-05 17:17:55 EST LOG: database system was not properly shut down; automatic recovery in progress
2011-08-05 17:17:55 EST LOG: redo starts at 208/5013A758
2011-08-05 17:17:55 EST LOG: record with zero length at 208/51497498
2011-08-05 17:17:55 EST LOG: redo done at 208/51497468
2011-08-05 17:17:55 EST LOG: last completed transaction was at log time 2011-08-05 17:17:52.709539+10
2011-08-05 17:18:03 EST LOG: autovacuum launcher started
2011-08-05 17:18:03 EST LOG: database system is ready to accept connections

For each of the other backend processes.

I'm a bit worried about corruption and would like to know:

- Is postgres 8.3.12 susceptible to corruption when a backend process is -9'd?

- How do we confirm that there has been no corruption?

We have nightly backups that dump every database in the cluster, and looking over postgres' logs I can't see any errors that might point to corruption... I guess that's a good sign - is there anything else I can look in to?

Thanks very much,

--Royce