> Olivier PRENANT writes... > > Because I've lost a lot of data using postgresql (and I know for sure this > should'nt happen) I've gone a bit further reading documentations on my > disks and... >
The bottom line here is that Olivier has lost some data and I'm sure we all want to know if there is a bug in PostgreSQL, or he has a hardware problem. However, PostgreSQL is partially implicated only because it discovered the error, but hasn't in any other way been associated yet with the fatal crash itself. My intuition tells me that this is hardware related. We've discussed some probable causes, but nobody has come up with a diagnostic test to evaluate the disks accuracy. This might be because this forum isn't the most appropriate place to discuss disk storage or linux device drivers? Olivier: if your disks are supported or under warranty, then my advice would be to contact these people and ask for details of a suitable diagnostic test, or go via their support forums to research this. Expensive disks are usually fairly well supported, especially if they smell an upgrade. :) My experience with other RDBMS vendor's support teams is that they give out this advice regularly when faced with RDBMS-reported data corruption errors: "check your disks are working"; I think it is reasonable to do the same here. Data corruption by the dbms does occur, but my experience is that this is frequent than hardware-related causes. In the past, I have used the dd command to squirt data at the disk, then read it back again - but there may be reasons I don't know why a success on that test might not be conclusive, so I personally would be happy to defer to someone that does. I've seen errors like this come from soon-to-fail disks, poor device drivers, failing non-volatile RAM, cabinet backplane noise, poorly wired cabling and intermittently used shared SCSI... Best of luck, Simon Riggs ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 1: subscribe and unsubscribe commands go to [EMAIL PROTECTED]