Unfinished Business with Postgres

Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by lelanthran on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @04:59PM (#31427587)

> One time, me, a noob, accidentally deleted files in the PG data directory. No noe! But PG had open handles to them so they aren't reclaimed by the FS and I was able to pg_dump. Not a production system but the loss would've been "big". Just saying, PG itself is very resilient.

That isn't a PG thing; Linux[1] ext3/4 does not actually delete files (or directories) that are still in use. Only the name is removed. The file itself remains until the last open handle to it is closed.

[1] Amongst other OSes

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by gjvc on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @05:17PM (#31427802)

if you'd read the previous post carefully, you'd have seen they said that

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by lelanthran on Thursday May 19, 2022 @03:32AM (#31431780)

> if you'd read the previous post carefully, you'd have seen they said that

I did read it carefully (and quoted the whole thing for context), but that final line made it seem that it was PG that was responsible for that particular instance of resilience.

Someone who isn't familiar with how ext3/4 handles deletes might, from the comment alone, assume that the same sort of thing would happen on other filesystems.

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by factcheckdec on Wednesday May 18, 2022 @09:07PM (#31429517)

Did their clarification truly merit such a snarky response?

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by gjvc on Thursday May 19, 2022 @02:35AM (#31431415)

it wasn't clarification; it was repetition

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by hombre_fatal on Thursday May 19, 2022 @03:10AM (#31431613)

No, the comment did make it sound like it was PG’s resilience that saved the data. In fact that seems to be the whole point of the comment.

So the snark does seem out of place and the clarification useful.

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by gjvc on Thursday May 19, 2022 @03:32AM (#31431785)

nice bit of white-knighting there

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Re:Unfinished Business with Postgres by lelanthran on Thursday May 19, 2022 @04:23AM (#31432060)

> nice bit of white-knighting there

Is it really constructive to throw insults[1]? I explained myself above, after all.

[1] I had to look it up to see what it means: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_knight. Since we aren't in a business context, I can only assume that you think I am female :-)

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