Re: Remove fsync ON/OFF as a visible option?

On Fri, Mar 20, 2015 at 3:26 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd(at)commandprompt(dot)com> wrote:
> Fair enough. I am not going to name names but over the years (and just
> today) I ran into another user that corrupted their database by turning off
> fsync.

My experience is different than yours: I haven't found this to be a
particularly common mistake. I think I've had more people screw
themselves by setting autovacuum_naptime=something_excessively_large
or enable_seqscan=off.

I'm very skeptical that removing stuff from postgresql.conf is going
to help anything. If you go through your postgresql.conf and change
settings at random, bad things will happen. But anyone who is doing
that has a problem we can't fix.

Thus far, the rule for postgresql.conf has been that pretty much
everything goes in there, and that's a defensible position. Other
reasonable options would be to ship the file with a small handful of
settings in it and leave everything else, or to ship it completely
empty of comments with only those settings that initdb sets and
nothing else. I'd be OK a coherent policy change in this area, but
just removing one or two setting seems like it will be confusing
rather than helpful.

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