Re: Checksums by default?

On 2017-01-21 13:03:52 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> * Andres Freund (andres(at)anarazel(dot)de) wrote:
> > On 2017-01-21 12:46:05 -0500, Stephen Frost wrote:
> > > Do you run with all defaults in those environments?
> >
> > Irrelevant - changing requires re-initdb'ing. That's unrealistic.
>
> I disagree. Further, we can add an option to be able to disable
> checksums without needing to re-initdb pretty trivially, which addresses
> the case where someone's having a problem because it's enabled, as
> discussed.

Sure, it might be easy, but we don't have it. Personally I think
checksums just aren't even ready for prime time. If we had:
- ability to switch on/off at runtime (early patches for that have IIRC
been posted)
- *builtin* tooling to check checksums for everything
- *builtin* tooling to compute checksums after changing setting
- configurable background sweeps for checksums

then the story would look differently. Right now checksums just aren't
particularly useful due to not having the above. Just checking recent
data doesn't really guarantee much - failures are more likely in old
data, and the data might even be read from ram.

Greetings,

Andres Freund