Re: Problem with ALTER TABLE - occasional "tuple concurrently updated"

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 10:48 AM, Jon Nelson <jnelson+pgsql(at)jamponi(dot)net> wrote:
> I have a process which runs in parallel creating tables which, as the
> /final/ step in the import, gets SQL much like the following applied:
>
> ALTER TABLE foo INHERIT bar;
>
> Periodically, I get this error:  tuple concurrently updated
>
> Of course, I googled for the error message and see a bunch of issues
> involving ANALYZE and even DROP function.
> Is this the same root cause? Is there a fix? Is there a lock I could
> take or some other approach that would prevent the error?
> I thought all ALTER TABLE statements took a big fat lock to prevent
> such an issue.

The ALTER TABLE generates that error? Is it running concurrently with
any other DML? What version of PostgreSQL is this?

That does sound like a bug.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company