Re: BUG #14237: Terrible performance after accidentally running 'drop index' for index still being created

On 11/07/2016, 18:08, "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> David Waller <dwaller(at)yammer-inc(dot)com> writes:
> > Thank you for the detailed explanation. This all seems very sensible, and
> > reasonable behaviour from Postgres. Yet... it still 'allowed' me to shoot myself
> > painfully in the foot. User error, I agree, yet people make mistakes - could
> > Postgres behave more gracefully?
>
> Well, there are always tradeoffs. You could choose to run with a
> non-infinite setting of lock_timeout, which would have caused the DROP to
> fail after waiting a second or two (or whatever you set the timeout to
> be). That would move the denial of service over to the problematic DDL,
> which might be a good tradeoff for your environment. But not everybody is
> going to think that query failure is a "more graceful" solution.

Thank you! lock_timeout sounds like exactly what I need to set - thank you for
helping out.

Now I know about lock_timeout I agree, there's nothing worth changing here.
Postgres already has the tools built in to allow me to get the behaviour I
wanted in this sitution.

Thank you for your patient explanations.

David