turn WAL off.

Alexander Cohen wrote:

Is it possible to turn WAL completely off. For good reasons, i dont
ever want to use it. How can i turn it off?

No.

-- 
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  pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 359-1001
  +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  13 Roberts Road
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On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 04:54:36PM -0400, Alexander Cohen wrote:

Is it possible to turn WAL completely off. For good reasons, i dont
ever want to use it. How can i turn it off?

You can't. The postgresql team is not in the business of producing
databases that can't handle a power failure.

Any hints as to what your "good reason" is?

--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/

On Fri, May 28, 2004 at 04:54:36PM -0400, Alexander Cohen wrote:

Is it possible to turn WAL completely off. For good reasons, i dont
ever want to use it. How can i turn it off?

You can't. The postgresql team is not in the business of producing
databases that can't handle a power failure.

Any hints as to what your "good reason" is?

I need a small cluster. Thats the main reason. 30 Mb with no data in it
is pretty large, to me at least. And im not using it in a manner that a
power failure will matter. It used to be possible before 7.1 right? At
least thats what it seems to say. It says something like "... since
7.1, WAL is turned on automatically..."

Alex

Alexander Cohen <alex@toomuchspace.com> writes:

Is it possible to turn WAL completely off. For good reasons, i dont
ever want to use it. How can i turn it off?

You can't. The postgresql team is not in the business of producing
databases that can't handle a power failure.

Any hints as to what your "good reason" is?

I need a small cluster. Thats the main reason. 30 Mb with no data in it .
is pretty large, to me at least. And im not using it in a manner that a
power failure will matter.

To be blunt, you don't want Postgres. Consider Berkeley DB or tinysql
or (holds nose) MySQL. What you're after isn't within the design goals
for this project, either as to disk footprint or disinterest in power
failure behavior.

regards, tom lane

tom lane writes:

To be blunt, you don't want Postgres. Consider Berkeley DB or tinysql
or (holds nose) MySQL. What you're after isn't
within the design goals for this project, either
as to disk footprint or disinterest in power
failure behavior.

Or, put the WAL files on a RAM disk (/tmp under Solaris, dunno for
Linux). Soft links would do the trick nicely. Make sure that you
understand that shutting down the machine, even cleanly, will likely
destroy your Pg installation.

I have actually done this temporarily during emergency Oracle recovery,
when it was important to minimuze reload time. If the machine crashed
during the reload, I didn't really lose that much.

Slightly off topic for this thread... I figured I give it a whirl...

I've often wondered what sort of performance increase one would get by placing
the WAL on a solid-state drive like a 2 or 4GB TiGi. Has anyone tested this
type of setup for a performance gain? For a 2GB drive it runs ~$3000. It would
really have to make a difference... I'm strongly cosidering testing this out.

CG

--- Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Alexander Cohen <alex@toomuchspace.com> writes:

Is it possible to turn WAL completely off. For good reasons, i dont
ever want to use it. How can i turn it off?

You can't. The postgresql team is not in the business of producing
databases that can't handle a power failure.

Any hints as to what your "good reason" is?

I need a small cluster. Thats the main reason. 30 Mb with no data in it .
is pretty large, to me at least. And im not using it in a manner that a
power failure will matter.

To be blunt, you don't want Postgres. Consider Berkeley DB or tinysql
or (holds nose) MySQL. What you're after isn't within the design goals
for this project, either as to disk footprint or disinterest in power
failure behavior.

regards, tom lane

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