Re: Index corruption issue after migration from RHEL 7 to RHEL 9 (PostgreSQL 11 streaming replication)

Hi Krishna,

This might be due to the upgrade in glibc between RHEL7 and RHEL8, which
includes updated collations that change sort orders and thus invalidate
existing indexes, forcing them to be rebuilt (on a RHEL>7 system) if they
contain any values which sort differently under the new collation than the
old one.

More details can be found here, including a query to identify affected
indexes: https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Locale_data_changes

[RHEL] *Version 8 uses the new locale data*. Therefore, caution will be
> necessary when upgrading."

Thanks, Chris.

On Wed, 22 Oct 2025 at 11:53, Bala M <krishna(dot)pgdba(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi Team,
>
> We are facing an issue related to index corruption after migrating our
> PostgreSQL 11 setup from *RHEL 7* to *RHEL 9* using *streaming
> replication* (base backup method).
>
> After bringing up the standby on RHEL 9, we observed that certain tables
> are not returning results when queries use indexed scans. Upon
> investigation, the following check confirms index corruption:
>
> The same indexes work fine on the RHEL 7 (primary) side. However, on the RHEL 9 replica, queries that rely on this index return zero records.
> Rebuilding the indexes fixed the issue temporarily but we have many indexes and our DB size is more than 10TB.
>
> *Environment details:*
>
> -
>
> PostgreSQL Version: 11.15
> -
>
> OS on primary: RHEL 7.9
> -
>
> OS on standby: RHEL 9.6
> -
>
> Replication Type: Streaming replication (initialized using
> pg_basebackup)
> -
>
> Data Directory initialized from RHEL 7 base backup
>
> *Issue Summary:*
>
> -
>
> Indexes appear and are the same size as per prod on standby after
> base backup restore.
> -
>
> We are able to read the data from the tables without index scans on
> standy by RHEL 9.
> -
>
> No filesystem or WAL errors observed in logs.
>
> Could this be related to OS-level binary or page layout differences
> between RHEL 7 and RHEL 9 for PostgreSQL 11 binaries?
> Any insights or recommended actions would be greatly appreciated.
>
>
> Thanks & Regards,
> *krishna.*
>
>