Hacker News Reader

Transactions that haven‘t been written to the WAL yet are also lost when the server crashes or you run pgdump. Stuff not in WAL is not safe in any means, its still a transaction in progress.

If a filesystem backup isn't consistent, the app isn't using sync correctly and needs a bug report. No amount of magic can work around an app that wants to corrupt data.

For most apps, the answer is usually "use a database" that correctly saves data.

Entire companies have been built around synchronizing the WAL with ZFS actions like snapshot and clone (i.e. Delphix and probably others). Would be cool to have `zpgdump` (single-purpose, ZFS aware equivalent).