Re: Re: [COMMITTERS] pgsql: Properly set relpersistence for fake relcache entries.

On Sep 14, 2012, at 12:17 PM, Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndQuadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> The bug itself is not major, but the extent and user impact is serious.

I don't think I understand how you're using the word major there. I seem to recall some previous disputation between you and I about the use of that term, so maybe it would be good to get that cleared up. To me major and serious mean about the same thing, so it can't for me be one but not the other.

Definitions aside, I think it's a pretty scary issue. It basically means that if you have a recovery (crash or archive) during which you read a buffer into memory, the buffer won't be checkpointed. So if, before the buffer is next evicted, you have a crash, and if at least one checkpoint has intervened between the most recent WAL-logged operation on the buffer and the crash, you're hosed. That's not a terribly unlikely scenario.

While I can't claim to understand exactly what our standards for forcing an immediate minor release are, I think this is pretty darn bad. I certainly don't want my customers running with this for a minute longer than necessary, and I feel really bad for letting it get into a release, let alone go undetected for this long. :-(

...Robert