Re: FATAL: catalog is missing attributes

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com> writes:
> Bruno Cortes wrote:
>> This was even worse than the previous error. Right now I cannot enter
>> the database neither make a dump. When I execute a command such as "psql
>> -U postgres center-01" I get the error:
>> psql: FATAL: catalog is missing 10 attribute(s) for relid 1262

> Sounds very much like you haven't been doing the required vacuum on all
> system catalogs.

I don't think so --- that error is coming out of the relcache/syscache
layer, and that code uses SnapshotNow; so it's only going to care
whether the tuples are marked committed, not whether they've wrapped
around.

I'm afraid that Bruno has lost some pages of pg_attribute (eg, they went
to zeroes). That's not too surprising given his previous reports
suggesting hardware problems.

If the pages in question held only rows for system catalogs then it
might be possible to copy correct values from elsewhere, but if they
held rows for user tables then he's got serious problems :-(. My advice
would be to start thinking about restoring from backup.

regards, tom lane