Re: Odd corruption issue reported on dba.stackexchange.com, need advice

On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 7:48 AM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:
> On 07/24/2012 05:31 PM, Marcin Mańk wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jul 24, 2012 at 3:16 AM, Craig Ringer <ringerc(at)ringerc(dot)id(dot)au> wrote:
>>>
>>> It shouldn't matter - only PostgreSQL was restarted, not the whole
>>> machine - and cleanly at that. Very strange.
>
> # if that still not helps, use the big hammer
> if (-f $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid') {
> print "(does not shutdown, killing the process)";
> $pid = get_running_pid $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid';
> kill (9, $pid) if $pid;
> unlink $info{'pgdata'}.'/postmaster.pid';
> $result = 0;
> }
>
> Could the "big hammer mode" be what's killed the database?
>
>
> Gah, that's not very wise. While the DB is probably busy doing an immediate
> shutdown with I/O in flight and backends chatting, let's just KILL IT with
> no chance of recovery!
>
> I don't know whether PostgreSQL is supposed to cope in this situation or if
> it counts as abuse beyond what's reasonable. Either way it this is the cause
> then either Pg or the shutdown script have a potential data corruption bug.

Yes PG should theoretically survive be able to survive anything as
long as fsync is being properly honored.