Re: Hard limit on WAL space used (because PANIC sucks)

On Thu, Jun 6, 2013 at 4:28 PM, Christian Ullrich <chris(at)chrullrich(dot)net> wrote:
> * Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
>
>> The current situation is that if you run out of disk space while writing
>> WAL, you get a PANIC, and the server shuts down. That's awful. We can
>
>
>> So we need to somehow stop new WAL insertions from happening, before
>> it's too late.
>
>
>> A naive idea is to check if there's enough preallocated WAL space, just
>> before inserting the WAL record. However, it's too late to check that in
>
>
> There is a database engine, Microsoft's "Jet Blue" aka the Extensible
> Storage Engine, that just keeps some preallocated log files around,
> specifically so it can get consistent and halt cleanly if it runs out of
> disk space.
>

fwiw, informix (at least until IDS 2000, not sure after that) had the
same thing. only this was a parameter to set, and bad things happened
if you forgot about it :D

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