Re: Checksums by default?

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 3:05 PM, Michael Paquier <michael(dot)paquier(at)gmail(dot)com>
wrote:

> On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 7:39 PM, Magnus Hagander <magnus(at)hagander(dot)net>
> wrote:
> > Is it time to enable checksums by default, and give initdb a switch to
> turn
> > it off instead?
> >
> > I keep running into situations where people haven't enabled it, because
> (a)
> > they didn't know about it, or (b) their packaging system ran initdb for
> them
> > so they didn't even know they could. And of course they usually figure
> this
> > out once the db has enough data and traffic that the only way to fix it
> is
> > to set up something like slony/bucardo/pglogical and a whole new server
> to
> > deal with it.. (Which is something that would also be good to fix -- but
> > having the default changed would be useful as well)
>
> Perhaps that's not mandatory, but I think that one obstacle in
> changing this default is to be able to have pg_upgrade work from a
> checksum-disabled old instance to a checksum-enabled instance. That
> would really help with its adoption.
>

That's a different usecase though.

If we just change the default, then we'd have to teach pg_upgrade to
initialize the upgraded cluster without checksums. We still need to keep
that *option*, just reverse the default.

Being able to enable checksums on the fly is a different feature. Which I'd
really like to have. I have some unfinished code for it, but it's a bit too
unfinished so far :)

--
Magnus Hagander
Me: http://www.hagander.net/
Work: http://www.redpill-linpro.com/