Re: Enabling Checksums

On Mon, 2012-12-17 at 19:14 +0000, Simon Riggs wrote:
> We'll need a way of expressing some form of corruption tolerance.
> zero_damaged_pages is just insane,

The main problem I see with zero_damaged_pages is that it could
potentially write out the zero page, thereby really losing your data if
it wasn't already lost. (Of course, we document that you should have a
backup first, but it's still dangerous). I assume that this is the same
problem you are talking about.

I suppose we could have a new ReadBufferMaybe function that would only
be used by a sequential scan; and then just skip over the page if it's
corrupt, depending on a GUC. That would at least allow sequential scans
to (partially) work, which might be good enough for some data recovery
situations. If a catalog index is corrupted, that could just be rebuilt.
Haven't thought about the details, though.

Regards,
Jeff Davis