Rick Debay wrote:

> I'm installing Suse 11 for a database server, and need to set up the
> data file system to be as reliable as possible.
> It's going to be ext3 mounted with the sync flag. I was looking at the
> journaling options, and was wondering if journaling the data was worth
> it.

You will have the same effect as sync.

> From
> a data safety perspective, the data is on the disk whether it writes it
> to the
> data journal or directly to the file. While a partial write to a file
> would
> normally cause problems, in a transactional database the incomplete
> writes would
> just be rolled back.

Exactly.

> I can see a performance advantage if the journal is on different
> hardware, so as
> to handle burst conditions.
>
> Am I missing something? Does anyone have any recommendations?

With latest fixes to forced writes, you don't need any of those. Both
sync and data-journaling would slow down writes to entire partition, so
if you something else than just firebird databases on it, it will work
slower as well.

> Will Firebird have a problem if there was a partial write to the
> database file, and the OS did NOT report that the write was complete?

Only with forced-writes = OFF

> Secondly, am I correct in assuming that Firebird's temporary files do
> not need any special precautions such as making them synchronous or
> preserving them across reboots?

Yes.


--
Milan Babuskov
http://www.flamerobin.org
http://www.guacosoft.com