Re: cannot find attribute 1 of relation (second occurrence.)

"Nick Fankhauser" <nickf(at)ontko(dot)com> writes:
> We've just seen the following error for a second time since upgrading to
> 7.2.1-2:
> cannot find attribute 1 of relation <tablename>
> The first time, Tom Lane helped us by suggesting a reindex of pg_attribute.
> I tried this on the second case as well, and it solved the problem.

> At this point, I'm concerned because I've never encountered this error
> before in about 2 years of postgres use, but now I've seen it twice in the
> last two weeks, so I need to figure out why it happened.

We haven't seen any other reports of this that I can recall, so I'm
leaning towards the bad-hardware theory, but I never like blaming
problems on hardware. Next time it happens, would you shut down the
postmaster and make a copy of pg_attribute and its indexes (the physical
files) to send to me, before you reindex? Eyeballing the remains might
give some evidence one way or the other.

regards, tom lane