Re: Worries about delayed-commit semantics

On Fri, 22 Jun 2007, Tom Lane wrote:

> What's wrong with synchronous_commit? It's accurate and simple.

It's kind of a big word that not a lot of people understand the subtleties
of, and I'd be concerned it will sow confusion with the terminology used
for WAL synchronous writes.

When I explain to people the difference between transactions that have
just been committed and written to disk (but possibly still sitting in a
buffer) vs. ones that are known to have made it all the way through to the
platters via fsync, the word I use is that the writes have been confirmed.
If I were picking a GUC name to describe the current behavior I'd want to
call it "confirmed_commit=on". I think people easily understand the idea
that just because something wasn't confirmed, that doesn't mean it didn't
happen, you just can't be sure--and therefore there's a possibility it
could be lost.

--
* Greg Smith gsmith(at)gregsmith(dot)com http://www.gregsmith.com Baltimore, MD