Re: corrupted item pointer:???

"hubert depesz lubaczewski" <depesz(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> On 4/13/06, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>> AFAICS, the only non-index-related occurrence of that error message
>> is in PageRepairFragmentation, which is invoked by VACUUM. I'd say
>> it indicates a real problem and you shouldn't ignore it. You might
>> try using pg_filedump or some such to examine the table and see if
>> there's anything obvious about what happened to the corrupted page.

> i'm not familiar with this utility.

http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/

> i can of course find it using google, but how do i check what is wrong?

pg_filedump will complain about a bad item pointer (looks like the
message will be something about "Error: Item contents extend beyond block")

> i am even willing to upload the dump file, but with 4 milion records in
> table, it is going to be rather large...

I don't think we want to see the whole thing! But "pg_filedump -i -f"
output would be interesting for the specific block(s) that pg_filedump
reports errors for.

regards, tom lane