Software can have bugs, and PostgreSQL is no exception. Bugs in the database software rarely, if ever, lead directly to data corruption. Hardware can fail too, but hardware problems are not always so straightforward.

Disk, CPU, or memory failures don't always cause the server to crash. In fact, these failures can persist for weeks or even months before their detection by a monitoring infrastructure. Disk failures are generally abstracted away by RAID or SAN devices, and these arrays are designed to readily handle online rebuilds. Other types of failures are more subtle.

CPU or memory problems can manifest in several different ways. In order for PostgreSQL to function, the data from disk must be read into memory to be processed by the CPU. During any of these transition states, a bad CPU or RAM module can inject an invalid checksum or data value inconsistent with the rest of the database. However, PostgreSQL generally assumes that the database is consistent...