today at 02:37 PM
WAL in PostgreSQL: 3. Checkpoint
- Translation
We already got acquainted with the structure of the buffer cache — one of the main objects of the shared memory — and concluded that to recover after failure when all the RAM contents get lost, the write-ahead log (WAL) must be maintained.
The problem yet unaddressed, where we left off last time, is that we are unaware of where to start playing back WAL records during the recovery. To begin from the beginning, as the King from Lewis Caroll's Alice advised, is not an option: it is impossible to keep all the WAL records from the server start — this is potentially both a huge memory size and equally huge duration of the recovery. We need such a point that is gradually moving forward and that we can start the recovery at (and safely remove all the previous WAL records, accordingly). And this is the checkpoint, to be discussed below.
What features must the checkpoint have? We must be sure that all the WAL records starting with the checkpoint will be applied to the pages flushed to disk. If it were not the case, during recovery, we could read from disk a version of the page that is too old, apply the WAL record to it and by doing so, irreversibly hurt the data.
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The problem yet unaddressed, where we left off last time, is that we are unaware of where to start playing back WAL records during the recovery. To begin from the beginning, as the King from Lewis Caroll's Alice advised, is not an option: it is impossible to keep all the WAL records from the server start — this is potentially both a huge memory size and equally huge duration of the recovery. We need such a point that is gradually moving forward and that we can start the recovery at (and safely remove all the previous WAL records, accordingly). And this is the checkpoint, to be discussed below.
Checkpoint
What features must the checkpoint have? We must be sure that all the WAL records starting with the checkpoint will be applied to the pages flushed to disk. If it were not the case, during recovery, we could read from disk a version of the page that is too old, apply the WAL record to it and by doing so, irreversibly hurt the data.
