Reliability is an important property of any serious database system, and PostgreSQL does everything possible to guarantee reliable operation. One aspect of reliable operation is that all data recorded by a committed transaction should be stored in a nonvolatile area that is safe from power loss, operating system failure, and hardware failure (except failure of the nonvolatile area itself, of course). Successfully writing the data to the computer's permanent storage (disk drive or equivalent) ordinarily meets this requirement. In fact, even if a computer is fatally damaged, if the disk drives survive they can be moved to another computer with similar hardware and all committed transactions will remain intact.
While forcing data to the disk platters periodically might seem like a simple operation, it is not. Because disk drives are dramatically slower than main memory and CPUs, several layers of caching exist between the computer's main memory and the disk platters. First, there is the operating system's buffer cache, which caches frequently requested disk blocks and combines disk writes. Fortunately, all operating systems give applications a way to force writes from the buffer cache to disk, and PostgreSQL uses those features. (See the wal_sync_method parameter to adjust how this is done.)
Next, there might be a cache in the disk drive controller; this is particularly common on RAID controller cards. Some of these caches are write-through, meaning writes are sent to the drive as soon as they arrive. Others are write-back, meaning data is sent to the drive at some later time. Such caches can be a reliability hazard because the memory in the disk controller cache is volatile, and will lose its contents in a power failure. Better controller cards have battery-backup units (BBUs), meaning the card has a battery that maintains power to the cache in case of system power loss. After power is restored the data will be written to the disk drives.
And finally, most disk drives have caches. Some are write-through while some are write-back, and the same concerns about data loss exist for write-back drive caches as for disk controller caches. Consumer-grade IDE and SATA drives are particularly likely to have write-back caches that will not survive a power failure. Many solid-state drives (SSD) also have volatile write-back caches.
These caches can typically be disabled; however, the method for doing this varies by operating system and drive type:
On Linux, IDE and SATA drives can be queried using
hdparm -I
; write caching is enabled if there is
a *
next to Write cache
. hdparm -W 0
can be used to turn off write caching. SCSI drives can be queried
using sdparm.
Use sdparm --get=WCE
to check
whether the write cache is enabled and sdparm --clear=WCE
to disable it.
On FreeBSD, IDE drives can be queried using
atacontrol
and write caching turned off using
hw.ata.wc=0
in /boot/loader.conf
;
SCSI drives can be queried using camcontrol identify
,
and the write cache both queried and changed using
sdparm
when available.
On Solaris, the disk write cache is controlled by
format -e
.
(The Solaris ZFS file system is safe with disk write-cache
enabled because it issues its own disk cache flush commands.)
On Windows, if wal_sync_method
is
open_datasync
(the default), write caching can be disabled
by unchecking My Computer\Open\
.
Alternatively, set disk drive
\Properties\Hardware\Properties\Policies\Enable write caching on the diskwal_sync_method
to
fsync
or fsync_writethrough
, which prevent
write caching.
On macOS, write caching can be prevented by
setting wal_sync_method
to fsync_writethrough
.
Recent SATA drives (those following ATAPI-6 or later)
offer a drive cache flush command (FLUSH CACHE EXT
),
while SCSI drives have long supported a similar command
SYNCHRONIZE CACHE
. These commands are not directly
accessible to PostgreSQL, but some file systems
(e.g., ZFS, ext4) can use them to flush
data to the platters on write-back-enabled drives. Unfortunately, such
file systems behave suboptimally when combined with battery-backup unit
(BBU) disk controllers. In such setups, the synchronize
command forces all data from the controller cache to the disks,
eliminating much of the benefit of the BBU. You can run the
pg_test_fsync program to see
if you are affected. If you are affected, the performance benefits
of the BBU can be regained by turning off write barriers in
the file system or reconfiguring the disk controller, if that is
an option. If write barriers are turned off, make sure the battery
remains functional; a faulty battery can potentially lead to data loss.
Hopefully file system and disk controller designers will eventually
address this suboptimal behavior.
When the operating system sends a write request to the storage hardware,
there is little it can do to make sure the data has arrived at a truly
non-volatile storage area. Rather, it is the
administrator's responsibility to make certain that all storage components
ensure integrity for both data and file-system metadata.
Avoid disk controllers that have non-battery-backed write caches.
At the drive level, disable write-back caching if the
drive cannot guarantee the data will be written before shutdown.
If you use SSDs, be aware that many of these do not honor cache flush
commands by default.
You can test for reliable I/O subsystem behavior using diskchecker.pl
.
Another risk of data loss is posed by the disk platter write operations themselves. Disk platters are divided into sectors, commonly 512 bytes each. Every physical read or write operation processes a whole sector. When a write request arrives at the drive, it might be for some multiple of 512 bytes (PostgreSQL typically writes 8192 bytes, or 16 sectors, at a time), and the process of writing could fail due to power loss at any time, meaning some of the 512-byte sectors were written while others were not. To guard against such failures, PostgreSQL periodically writes full page images to permanent WAL storage before modifying the actual page on disk. By doing this, during crash recovery PostgreSQL can restore partially-written pages from WAL. If you have file-system software that prevents partial page writes (e.g., ZFS), you can turn off this page imaging by turning off the full_page_writes parameter. Battery-Backed Unit (BBU) disk controllers do not prevent partial page writes unless they guarantee that data is written to the BBU as full (8kB) pages.
PostgreSQL also protects against some kinds of data corruption on storage devices that may occur because of hardware errors or media failure over time, such as reading/writing garbage data.
Each individual record in a WAL file is protected by a CRC-32 (32-bit) check that allows us to tell if record contents are correct. The CRC value is set when we write each WAL record and checked during crash recovery, archive recovery and replication.
Data pages are not currently checksummed by default, though full page images recorded in WAL records will be protected; see initdb for details about enabling data checksums.
Internal data structures such as pg_xact
, pg_subtrans
, pg_multixact
,
pg_serial
, pg_notify
, pg_stat
, pg_snapshots
are not directly
checksummed, nor are pages protected by full page writes. However, where
such data structures are persistent, WAL records are written that allow
recent changes to be accurately rebuilt at crash recovery and those
WAL records are protected as discussed above.
Individual state files in pg_twophase
are protected by CRC-32.
Temporary data files used in larger SQL queries for sorts, materializations and intermediate results are not currently checksummed, nor will WAL records be written for changes to those files.
PostgreSQL does not protect against correctable memory errors and it is assumed you will operate using RAM that uses industry standard Error Correcting Codes (ECC) or better protection.