Re: Addressing: ERROR: could not access status of transaction

Mark Stosberg <mark(at)summersault(dot)com> writes:
> Last night we got the following error during a dump of an 8.0.6
> database:
> pg_dump: Error message from server: ERROR: could not access status of
> transaction 245900066
> Another dump run during the same time frame did not have this problem,
> and running the mentioned command in 'psql' produces no error.

> Research shows that this could be a corrupted tuple, but it's not
> clear what it means to me if it sometimes work.

Transient errors of this kind sound like flaky hardware to me. Might
be time to run some memory and disk diagnostics ...

> This follows behavior in the past few days where we noticed PostgreSQL
> core dumping repeatedly, with this error:
> PANIC: right sibling's left-link doesn't match
> The core dumps stopped when we REINDEX'ed the table mentioned in the
> PANIC statement.

That too could have been from a hardware fault during a previous index
update. (There's a known bug in early 8.1.x releases that had this
symptom, but not in 8.0.x IIRC.)

regards, tom lane