From: "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
> Well, that's unfortunate, but it's not clear that automatic recovery is
> possible.  The only way out of it would be if an undamaged copy of the
> segment was in pg_xlog/ ... but if I recall the logic correctly, we'd
> not even be trying to fetch from the archive if we had a local copy.

No, PG will try to fetch the WAL file from pg_xlog when it cannot get it 
from archive.  XLogFileReadAnyTLI() does that.  Also, PG manual contains the 
following description:

http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.1/static/continuous-archiving.html#BACKUP-ARCHIVING-WAL

WAL segments that cannot be found in the archive will be sought in pg_xlog/; 
this allows use of recent un-archived segments. However, segments that are 
available from the archive will be used in preference to files in pg_xlog/.

So, continuing recovery by changing the emode to LOG would work.  What do 
you think about this fix?


> I think having PG automatically destroy archive files is bordering on
> insane.


I agree.  Before that, PG cannot know the archive location, so PG cannot 
delete the partially filled archive files.

Regards
MauMau

In response to

• Re: Serious problem: media recovery fails after system or PostgreSQL crash at 2012-12-06 17:33:23 from Tom Lane

Responses

• Re: Serious problem: media recovery fails after system or PostgreSQL crash at 2012-12-06 23:52:12 from Tomas Vondra

pgsql-hackers by date

Next:	From: Andres Freund	Date: 2012-12-06 22:47:05
	Subject: Re: Re: How to check whether the row was modified by this transaction before?
Previous:	From: Tomas Vondra	Date: 2012-12-06 22:38:59
	Subject: Re: PATCH: optimized DROP of multiple tables within a transaction