Re: Row data corruption under 7.3.5

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Marc Mitchell wrote:

> This is follow-up to a problem first reported on 3/1/04. The problem
> has continued to occur intermittently and recently we experienced the
> first occurrence where the first column of a table was the column where
> the corrupted and thus we could not recover it.
> Google groups searching have found numerous hits for people reporting
> the same symptoms. While we've seen some instructions to get things
> back, we've seen nothing about correcting the root cause.

Have you tested your hardware and proven to yourself that both your memory
and your drive subsystem have no bad blocks or bits?

Postgresql is good, but it can't make up for broken hardware.

If you haven't actually tested your hardware, then you don't know if it's
truly reliable or not. and if you put a server into production without
testing the drives and memory, you can't just expect it to be good. I've
seen many a brand new server, both intel and Sparc based, with bad memory
or drives right from the factory.

> We've observed nothing that would lead us to believe there are any
> hardware problems.

What you are seeing from Postgresql IS a sign that you have hardware
problems. Please test your hardware immediately.