Re: PQgetCopyData() failed - corruption?

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Fran=E7ois_Beausoleil?= <francois(at)teksol(dot)info> writes:
> I received the following error while backing up my database:

> pg_dump: Dumping the contents of table "summary_show_unique_personas_2012_10_15" failed: PQgetCopyData() failed.
> pg_dump: Error message from server: pg_dump: The command was: COPY public.summary_show_unique_personas_2012_10_15 (market_id, period, show_id, service_id, service_name, gender, followers_count, interactions_count) TO stdout;

Hmm, what libpq version is pg_dump depending on? The lack of any "error
message from server" (which in this case really means "from libpq") is
odd. AFAICS, it is impossible in the current code for PQgetCopyData to
return a failure indication without setting up an appropriate textual
message too --- but it sure looks like it did for you, so I'm wondering
if this is an old version with some bug in the error handling code paths.

> Does that error indicate a database corruption? Or just a network interruption?

I'd guess it's just a lost connection. You could look at the
postmaster's log to see what happened according to that end.
If it logged "unexpected EOF on client connection" or some such, then
it was indeed just a dropped connection.

regards, tom lane