Hi all, I have not been giving much attention to the thread about enabling checksums online, which has resulted in the revert of the feature, but there is still pg_verify_checksums around. So I looked at it a bit.
I have a couple of questions/gotchas about it: 1) The documentation states that the cluster needs to be offline. Doesn't this imply that the cluster can also be forcibly killed? It seems to me that the documentation ought to say that the cluster needs to be shut down cleanly instead. Mentioning that only in the notes of the documentation would be enough in my opinion. 2) On a cluster where checksums are disabled, aka the control file says so, then using --force does not result in incorrect blocks to be reported. This is caused by the presence of the check on PG_DATA_CHECKSUM_VERSION which does not match for a cluster where checksums have been disabled. Wouldn't one want to know this information as well to know what are the portions of the data folder not treated yet by checksum updates? 3) Is the force option actually useful? I assume that --force is useful if one wants to check how checksums are computed if a switch off -> on is used to see the progress of the operation or to see how much progress has been done after doing an online switch, which is also what a228cc13 outlines. Still this requires the cluster to be offline... Attached is a patch which addresses point 1) (with one markup fix in bonus). I'd love to get more input about the other bullet points. Thanks, -- Michael
diff --git a/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_verify_checksums.sgml b/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_verify_checksums.sgml index 463ecd5e1b..e1f12ad4c4 100644 --- a/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_verify_checksums.sgml +++ b/doc/src/sgml/ref/pg_verify_checksums.sgml @@ -30,8 +30,8 @@ PostgreSQL documentation <refsect1 id="r1-app-pg_verify_checksums-1"> <title>Description</title> <para> - <command>pg_verify_checksums</command> verifies data checksums in a PostgreSQL - cluster. It must be run against a cluster that's offline. + <command>pg_verify_checksums</command> verifies data checksums in a + <productname>PostgreSQL</productname> cluster. </para> </refsect1> @@ -97,7 +97,8 @@ PostgreSQL documentation <refsect1> <title>Notes</title> <para> - Can only be run when the server is offline. + The cluster must be shut down cleanly before running + <application>pg_verify_checksums</application>. </para> </refsect1>
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