Comment by Sami_Lehtinen
13 years ago
It's same story with PostgreSQL aka Postgres. "Almost all corruption issues are related to hardware problems, and most of the rest are due to documented-unsafe configurations like disabling fsync."
But of course doing that is up to the user. Using write-back caching with long sync interval and disabling fsync. It's really nice, gives better than SSD performance with regular HDD. Until you shut it down uncleanly, then you're screwed. But of course any sane person would use this only for temporary or other really non-important data which can be regenerated or lost without problems in such situation.
I'm using such configuration with ERP,BI/ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) tasks. When I start the task, I anyway drop and recreate any tables required for the task. SO I don't really mind if data gets corrupted. That's just life. Doing safe commits would make task very slow.
Only good question is how to balance smartly, in application data / caching, database engine caching and file system caching. In cases where database runs on same server as the processing application.
I'd say that this is a good task for tablespaces and intelligent disk partitioning. Set up a partition for the data you really don't care about with all the speedup options, and create a tablespace that points to it.
Also keep this in mind: http://thebuild.com/blog/2013/03/10/you-cannot-recover-from-...