Re: Portable database ... ?

Florian v. Savigny wrote:
> Dear community,
>
> I'm not sure whether this is the appropriate forum (maybe it's
> actually better asked on the developers' list), but as my impression
> grows my question might be naive, I thought I should probably duly
> start as a novice:
>
> Is there any way to have the Linux and the Windows versions of
> PostgreSQL use the same database? (On a double-boot machine.)
>
> When trying this, I ran into trouble as soon as I tried to initiate a
> database on a VFAT partition while running Linux. That seemed to fail
> because VFAT does not support (sym)links:
>
> PANIC: could not link file "<root>/pg_xlog/xlogtemp.3846" to
> "<root>/pg_xlog/000000010000000000000000" (initialization of log
> file 0, segment 0): the operation is not permitted
>
> ("<root>" is the directory I specified to initdb using the -D option).
>
> What made me a little curious about this is that when I initiate a
> database on an ext3 partition, which of course succeeds, it definitely
> does not seem to contain any hard links or symlinks, just regular
> files (and none of the regular files has a link count >1).
>
> Of course a host of other issues could prevent such a "dual-OS", or
> "portable" database. I actually would just like to ask whether the
> route is worth pursuing at all ...

I would suspect permission issues before the symlink problems. I don't
believe VFAT supports any of the security models that PG can use.

Bob McConnell
N2SPP