On 4/7/20 12:44 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
On Tue, Apr 7, 2020 at 5:51 AM Peter Eisentraut
<peter.eisentr...@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
On 2020-04-03 21:07, Robert Haas wrote:
A new tool called pg_validatebackup can validate a backup against the
manifest.
In software engineering, "verify" and "validate" have standardized
distinct meanings. I'm not going to try to explain them here, but you
can easily find them online. I haven't formed an opinion on which one
of them this tool is doing, but I notice that both the man page and the
messages produced by the tool use the two terms seemingly
interchangeably. We should try to pick the correct term and use it
consistently.
The tool is trying to make sure that we have the same backup that
we're supposed to have, and that the associated WAL is present and
sane. Looking at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verification_and_validation, that sounds
more like verification than validation, but I confess that this
distinction is new to me.
When I searched I found a two different definitions for validation and
verification. One for software development (as in the link above and
what I think Peter meant) and another for data (see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_validation,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_verification,
https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-data-validation-and-vs-data-verification/)
It seems that validation vs. verify as defined in PMBOK (the former
sense) does not really apply here, though. That leaves only the latter
sense which appears less well-documented but points to "verify" as the
better option.
Regards,
--
-David
da...@pgmasters.net
