Re: Diagnostic functions

Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> Am Montag, 7. Mai 2007 11:49 schrieb Heikki Linnakangas:
>> It's handy to be able to inspect pages from within a live database.
>
> How reliable is it to inspect pages from within a database if you presumably
> suspect that database to be broken?

As long as the page header is valid, the functions should be able to
deal with it (as in not crashing).

I found them extremely useful when I was developing the MVCC-safe
CLUSTER patch. The index functions in pgstattuple were very useful when
I worked on clustered indexes. In fact I reinvented the wheel and wrote
a function of my own that did essentially the same thing as
bt_page_items, before Bruce pointed out that such a thing already exists.

>> We already played the name game on hackers. My original suggestion was
>> "pgforensics". "pgdiagfuncs" and "pginspect" were also suggested, among
>> others. I'm still open to suggestions, though. Have any?
>
> Something involving "page" would at least explain what you can diagnose.

Well, how about "pageinspect" then?

--
Heikki Linnakangas
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com