Re: Disable WAL completely

[Erik Jones]
> Right. Without the xlog directory you'll have very little chance of
> ever doing any kind of clean stop/start of your database. If you
> don't need the reliability offered by Postgres's use of transaction
> logs you'll probably be much better served with a different database
> or even a completely different storage scheme than trying to make
> Postgres fit that bill.

We actually have some postgres databases that are read-only, others that
can be rebuilt by a script or from some old backup, and yet others that
can be wiped completely without ill effects ... and others where we
would prefer to keep all the data, but it would be no disaster if we
lose some. Maybe we would be better off not using postgres for those
purposes, but it's oh so much easier for us to stick to one database
system ;-)

We've considered both running postgres from a ram-disk and to have the
fsync turned off for some of our databases, but right now we're running
all off one host, fsync didn't reduce the performance that much, and
after one disasterous power failure we considered that it was not worth
the effort to have fsync turned off.

That being said, postgres is probably not an optimal solution for an
embedded system running on flash memory ;-)