Comment "Don't kill -9 postmaster" is NOT about power loss (Score 1) 456
I lost faith that this guy knows what he's talking about when I read this:
> The PostgreSQL mailinglist doesn't have "don't kill -9 the postmaster!" as a standard signature to list messages for nothing.
Indeed that is standard advice, but it has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with power failure recoverability. The reason you're not supposed to do it is that hard-killing the postmaster doesn't get rid of its subprocesses or shared memory segment, which could make a subsequent attempt to restart the postmaster hazardous. But those things won't survive a system crash due to power loss (or any other reason).
I'm not really qualified to evaluate all the other statements in the article, but the fact that the one statement I do know about is hogwash doesn't make me feel good about the others.
