Re: vacuum: out of memory error

On Fri, Nov 24, 2006 at 11:59:16AM +0100, Jakub Ouhrabka wrote:
> I've done little research in mailing list archives and I found possible
> cause: table corruption caused by flaky hardware. Does it sound about
> right? Are there any other possible causes?

It sounds about right, yes; but the other possible cause is a
software bug. In the absence of data proving you have no hardware
problems, though, I think you'll find that people are singularly
unwilling to investigate software bugs in this case.

> What can be corrupted?

Anything.

> How can I check it?

You can try stepping through the table in question and seeing if you
run into problems anywhere. By binary search, you should be able to
narrow it pretty quickly.

> How can I correct it?

Well, the corrupt rows are lost. The usual method is "restore from
backup".

> What
> are possible consequences of this corruption?

You can't read the data. But you already knew that: it's why your
vacuum is blowing up.

A

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Andrew Sullivan | ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca
The plural of anecdote is not data.
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