Shaun Thomas: Looking Forward to Postgres 19: Checksums For All

Data checksums are one of those Postgres features that, when they are doing their job, are easily forgotten. They sit quietly in the header of every data page as a small integer fingerprint, forever waiting to thwart the threat of cosmic rays or errant hardware failures. Most clusters run from cradle to grave and never trip a single one.For years, that decision was etched in stone at the time of database initialization . It wasn't until version 12 that Postgres introduced the pg_checksums utility to change it. And even then, doing so is a fully offline affair, grinding through every page on di