-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 09/06/07 10:43, TJ O'Donnell wrote: > I am getting in the habit of storing much of my day-to-day > information in postgres, rather than "flat" files. > I have not had any problems of data corruption or loss, > but others have warned me against abandoning files. > I like the benefits of enforced data types, powerful searching, > data integrity, etc. > But I worry a bit about the "safety" of my data, residing > in a big scary database, instead of a simple friendly > folder-based files system. > > I ran across this quote on Wikipedia at > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_%28e-mail_client%29 > > "Text files are also much safer than databases, in that should disk > corruption occur, most of the mail is likely to be unaffected, and any > that is damaged can usually be recovered." > > How naive (optimistic?) is it to think that "the database" can > replace "the filesystem"? Text file are *simple*. When fsck repairs the disk and creates a bunch of recovery files, just fire up $EDITOR (or cat, for that matter) and piece your text files back together. You may lose a block of data, but the rest is there, easy to read. Database files are *complex*. Pointers and half-vacuumed freespace and binary fields and indexes and WALs, yadda yadda yadda. And, by design, it's all got to be internally consistent. Any little corruption and *poof*, you've lost a table. A strategically placed corruption and you've lost your database. But... that's why database vendors create backup/restore commands. You *do* back up your database(s), right?????? - -- Ron Johnson, Jr. Jefferson LA USA Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day. Hit him with a fish, and he goes away for good! -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.4.6 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFG4D2nS9HxQb37XmcRAg73AKCD321T0u7lux0K2NBhkpQ4kwBjOwCfWh3D WDuns1HAZboUPlraTzbE0oo= =NuLE -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 5: don't forget to increase your free space map settings
