Re: Does PostgreSQL check database integrity at startup?

Greetings Brent,

* Brent Wood (pcreso(at)yahoo(dot)com) wrote:
> A tool to calculate a checksum of sorts based on the table (file) content would provide a better surety of duplication than simply checking file size - like differently vacuumed tables in each copy could have the same content but be different file sizes.

PG has support for checksums and there are tools out there to validate
that the checksum is correct for all pages which have one, but that
wouldn't help in this case because the file is zero'd out (and a zero'd
out file is actually a valid file in a PG data directory).

Also, the files on the primary and the replica actually can be different
when looked at with a complete-file checksum due to hint bits being set
differently (at least, possibly other ways too). That doesn't make them
invalid or incorrect though.

Rather than trying to compare a running primary to a running replica,
such a check to verify that the files backed up during a backup have the
same checksum as the files being restored from that backup can be done,
and that *is* done in at least some of the PG backup tools already
(pgBackRest has an independent manifest that it stores for each backup
which contains the checksum of each file as-backed-up, and it verifies
that checksum when performing a restore to make sure that the backed up
file wasn't corrupted in place, other tools hopefully have similar).

> I do wonder though - given the order of records in a table (file) is not necessarily identical (or is it?) event this may be problematic. Perhaps a checksum based on the result of a query output ordered by primary key could work?

The order of records in a *file* should be the same in the heap on the
primary as they are on the replica, but that doesn't mean the contents
of those files will be exactly the same (as mentioned above, hint bits
can differ). We used to have cases where the indexes could also be
different, but I believe that was changed so they should match.

I've used the approach of doing a checksum across the results of an
ordered query to compare between systems and that generally does work,
but it's a bit tricky if you're trying to compare a table that's heavily
modified- you need to determine the point in the WAL stream that you're
at on the primary when you run the query and then replay the replica to
that point in the WAL and then run the query on the replica, otherwise
you could end up with differences that are just because of the ongoing
transactions being run to update the table.

Thanks!

Stephen