Re: [PATCHES] [HACKERS] wal_checksum = on (default) | off

2007-01-04 Thread Tom Lane
Ron Mayer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> Quoting wikipedia:
> "Adler-32 has a weakness for short messages with few hundred bytes,
>  because the checksums for these messages have a poor coverage of
>  the 32 available bits...Jonathan Stone discovered in 2001 that Adler-32
>  has a weakness...An extended explanation can be found in RFC 3309,
>  which mandates the use of CRC32 instead of Adler-32"

[ looks at the RFC... ]  Yeah, so that pretty much kills it for WAL
entries, which are mostly short.

regards, tom lane

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Re: [PATCHES] [HACKERS] wal_checksum = on (default) | off

2007-01-04 Thread Ron Mayer
Tom Lane wrote:
> Florian Weimer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
>> Have you tried switching to Adler32 instead of CRC32?
> 
> Is anything known about the error detection capabilities of Adler32?
> There's a lot of math behind CRCs but AFAIR Adler's method is pretty
> much ad-hoc.


As I understand it, it's kinda well studied; but has known
weaknesses in its ability to detect errors under some conditions.

Quoting wikipedia:
"Adler-32 has a weakness for short messages with few hundred bytes,
 because the checksums for these messages have a poor coverage of
 the 32 available bits...Jonathan Stone discovered in 2001 that Adler-32
 has a weakness...An extended explanation can be found in RFC 3309,
 which mandates the use of CRC32 instead of Adler-32"

I'm not sure if I'm kidding or not here, but I wonder if the not
uncommon requests on the lists of weakening protective features
in postgresql (full-page writes, fsync off, "but mysql says", etc)
suggest that a "dont_protect_against_os_or_hardware_failures" mode
might be in demand for non-critical / development instances.

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