Re: how critical is WAL

> > > Indexes could get corrupt, requiring rebuilding.
> > > That problem is gone
> > > with WAL. Transaction commits where always safe.
> > >
> >
> > Thanks. I was specifically asking about Result '3'
> > above mentions 'totally corrupted table page content
> > because of partially written data pages' . Is this
> > also repairable ?
>
> I never heard of that happening to anyone.

Sorry to disappoint you but it seems to be the case with my crash.

One of our customers accindentally switched off his machine.
This is a shop with 5500+ items. The table contained these items
were lost. All the other tables (bills, partners, etc.) were in
good shape, select retrieved all data from them.

I looked into the postgres manuals and as it suggests, I stopped
postmaster and I tried to reindex this table in a standalone
postgres. "reindex table" (without force) did not reindexed.
"reindex index" dumped core. I dropped the primary index and
tried to recreate it, but it also dumped core.

I guess it falls under the 3rd category of your listed types of data loss.
:-(

The question still is : is this kind of failure repairable?

The system is: RH 6.2, kernel-2.2.16-3, postgresql-7.0.3 rpms from
ftp.postgresql.org.

Regards,
Zoltan Boszormenyi