Re: question about wal and point in time recovery

Tom Lane wrote:
> > can the log be modified before recovery occurs.
>
> Not easily. If you were to hack any one log entry, you'd have to
> recompute the CRC checksum for it, and there's no way at all to make
> a change that would involve changing the size of a log entry. So
> really the only useful option you have here is to stop recovery short
> of a particular log entry you don't like.
>
> > my biggest concern is that somebody in my org, for example, deletes a
> > field or fudges an update query that changes a foreign key to a single
> > value - and therefore destroys table links. so what if this happens
> > and nobody notices it for several weeks?
>
> There is no automatic recovery mechanism that is going to help you in
> such a scenario. You can't expect to undo a long-ago change and not
> have that break some unknown number of consequent decisions.

I think it might be easier to somehow hack the binary that reads the WAL
file on recovery to adjust how it handles a certain WAL entry, rather
than modifying the WAL files itself.

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