Re: pgsql: Generate backup manifests for base backups, and validate them.

On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 5:51 AM Peter Eisentraut
<peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> wrote:
> On 2020-04-03 21:07, Robert Haas wrote:
> > A new tool called pg_validatebackup can validate a backup against the
> > manifest.
>
> In software engineering, "verify" and "validate" have standardized
> distinct meanings. I'm not going to try to explain them here, but you
> can easily find them online. I haven't formed an opinion on which one
> of them this tool is doing, but I notice that both the man page and the
> messages produced by the tool use the two terms seemingly
> interchangeably. We should try to pick the correct term and use it
> consistently.

The tool is trying to make sure that we have the same backup that
we're supposed to have, and that the associated WAL is present and
sane. Looking at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verification_and_validation, that sounds
more like verification than validation, but I confess that this
distinction is new to me.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company