Re: Offline enabling/disabling of data checksums

Hi,

I have added it to the commitfest now:

https://commitfest.postgresql.org/21/1944/

On Sat, Dec 22, 2018 at 08:28:34AM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 09:16:16PM +0100, Michael Banck wrote:
> > It adds an (now mandatory) --action parameter that takes either verify,
> > enable or disable as argument.
>
> There are two discussion points which deserve attention here:
> 1) Do we want to rename pg_verify_checksums to something else, like
> pg_checksums. I like a lot if we would do a simple renaming of the
> tool, which should be the first step taken.

I am for it, but don't mind whether it's before or afterwards, your
call.

> 2) Which kind of interface do we want to use? When I did my own
> flavor of pg_checksums, I used an --action switch able to use the
> following values:
> - enable
> - disable
> - verify
> The switch cannot be specified twice (perhaps we could enforce the
> last value as other binaries do in the tree, not sure if that's
> adapted here). A second type of interface is to use one switch per
> action. For both interfaces if no action is specify then the tool
> fails. Vote is open.

Even though my fork has the separate switches, I like the --action one.
On the other hand, it is a bit more typing as you always have to spell
out the action (is there precendent of accepting also incomplete option
arguments like 'v', 'e', 'd'?).

> > This is basically meant as a stop-gap measure in case online activation
> > of checksums won't make it for v12, but maybe it is independently
> > useful?
>
> I think that this is independently useful, I got this stuff part of an
> upgrade workflow where the user is ready to accept some extra one-time
> offline time so as checksums are enabled.

OK; we have also used that at clients - if the instance has a size of
less than a few dozen GBs, enabling checksums during a routine minor
upgrade restart is not delaying things much.

> > 2. Rename the scan_* functions (Michael renamed them to operate_file and
> > operate_directory but I am not sure it is worth it.
>
> The renaming makes sense, as scan implies only reading while enabling
> checksums causes a write.

Ok, will do in the next version.

Michael

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