catastrophic recovery required

[Tom Anderson]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matthias Andree" <matthias.andree at gmx.de>
> The right thing to do, except if sitting at the end of a branch line in
> a rural area, is to pick an electricity company that provides better
> service. I cannot say when exactly we've had the last blackout in
> Germany in my area, I recall three blackouts in the past three years,
> lasting under 45 mins each, one was around a minute or two.

We normally get some disruptions from lightning storms once or twice a year, 
and occasionally from heavy ice bringing lines down, but the last time I 
lost power at home was the "big Northeast blackout" in 2003.  At work 
though, we get hiccups every two or three days which only last a split 
second to five minutes, but still manage to restart all of the computers.  A 
UPS is indispensible.  I have one on my workstations and a bank of them for 
my test server and other internal servers, while the production servers are 
in a managed hosting facility with backup generators.  There's really very 
little excuse for allowing power problems to disrupt your database... you 
can get UPS's at http://tigerdirect.com for under $100.  They may only 
protect you for 15-20 minutes, but usually that's enough for the power to 
come back on, and if not, it's enough to gracefully shut down the server.

Nonetheless, is it possible to change the database page size to the 
harddrive page size?  Can this be detected and configured automatically 
during install?

Tom

P.S. Ultimately, going off-grid is the best solution, which is what I'm 
doing in my new house.  All wind and solar with deisel backup.  Even though 
I only pay around $0.07/kWh on the grid, turbine and solar cell prices have 
made them competitive.  Of course this doesn't make sense except for new 
construction mostly.