Re: Problems with missing OIDs

Hi Tom,

> Alexander Lohse <al(at)humantouch(dot)de> writes:
>> after a disk-crash some weeks ago and a successful recovery, I now
>> find some strange issues in postgres.
>> I am not sure they are related to the crash, but I figure chances
>> are ...
>
> That really shouldn't have happened in the first place. Are you
> running
> an up-to-date Postgres version? Are you sure your disk drives don't
> lie
> about write completion?

the server is running PostgreSQL 7.4. The disks where replaced by our
hosting partners, so I do not know anything about their internal state.

What else could produce such a mess?

>> One of them is: When trying to vacuum one database I get the
>> following
>> message:
>> "ERROR: could not open relation with OID 36893600"
>
>> Now I searched and found a row in pg_index with
>> indexrelid => 36893600
>> Is it save to just drop this row? Or how do I find out which index is
>> affected?
>
> Well, if the pg_class row with that OID is gone, then there's no
> direct
> way to know. But you should be able to look at the row referenced by
> indrelid, to find out which table it was an index *of*. Hopefully you
> know your schema well enough to figure out which of its indexes is
> missing.

Yes, that was easy to find.

The index for a primary key contstraint on that table is missing.

I also cannot drop and recreate that constraint!

Can I just go ahead and drop the corresponding rows from pg_contraint
and pg_index?

> I would recommend a dump/initdb/reload cycle to try to detect and
> clean
> up any other corruption. Loss of just one pg_class row doesn't seem
> like a very probable failure, so I'm afraid you may have more
> problems.

Currently I cannot create any dump because postgres just stops at the
error. ;-(

So, our backup scripts are all broke ... :-(

Thank you,

Alex
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