Re: delete is getting hung when there is a huge data in table

> still this delete operation is not working and not a single row has
been deleted from the table.

This is an intended effect of ACID properties compliance = transactions
are guaranteed to atomically show their effects upon completion or do
nothing at all. This also applies to multiple data-changing statements
if they're wrapped into a transaction.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID. Postgres just fully implements that
through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiversion_concurrency_control

As to why it takes forever, you're not providing enough information for
a solid hypothesis.

Speculation (8 million rows is not that big):

- very slow and database-unfriendly storage stack (RAID 5 perhaps?)
- missing indexes to match your clauses (on modern hardware a full table
scan over 8 million rows should complete in the order of minutes. Try to
run a select with the same clauses)
- have you checked if there are other processes holding exclusive locks
on the table/some of the records you're trying to delete? pg_lock and
pg_stat_activity are your friends here
- are there triggers on the table that could be slow/hitting locks in
other tables?

Regardless, you might want to split your statement into smaller chunks
through less greedy clauses and see what happens.

Regards

F

On 03/05/15 15:24, Mitu Verma wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am facing an issue with the deletion of huge data.
> We have a cronscript which is used to delete the data of last 3 months from one of the tables.
> Data in the table is large (8872597 as you can see the count below) since it is from last 3 months.
>
> fm_db_Server3=# select count(*) from audittraillogentry ;
>
>
> count
> ---------
> 8872597
> (1 row)
>
> Now issue is that when this script for the deletion of data is launched , it is taking more than 7 days and doing nothing i.e not a single row has been deleted.
>
> Then we stopped the script,terminated the database sessions by using SELECT pg_terminate_backend(proc pid) and run the following command
>
> delete from audittraillogentry where intime <= to_timestamp('2015-01-30 23:59:59.999', 'YYYY/MM/DD-HH24:MI:SS.FF3') OR outtime <= to_timestamp('2015-01-30 23:59:59.999', 'YYYY/MM/DD-HH24:MI:SS.FF3');
> still this delete operation is not working and not a single row has been deleted from the table.
>
> Now i have following questions -
>
> 1. If postgreSQL has some limitations for deletion of large data?
> 2. If i should run the vacumm, after stopping the cron script ? because probably to get the "smaller" table?
> 3. if dropping the indexes can help here? now sure.
> 4.if i should think about partitioning , if there is any limitation while delaing with large data in postgreSQL?
>
> regards
> Mitu
>
> _____
> ___________________________________
>
>