Re: [GENERAL] Concurrency problem building indexes

On 4/24/06 7:54 PM, "Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby(at)pervasive(dot)com> wrote:

>> Long ago. I just tested it again, and AFAICS you can create indexes
>> concurrently so long as the underlying table isn't changing (ie,
>> neither reltuples nor relpages changes).
>
> Hrm, the OP seemed to find a case that was having problems:
> http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2006-04/msg01009.php
>
> Of course it's possible that he's getting that error from an entirely
> different section of code, or that this is now only an issue if you're
> doing a lot of indexing at once...

I don't think there's much chance it's other code. The index build is a
standalone operation in an external script that uses psql (so it is easy to
tailor). This script is called as the last statement before the main
program exit. It does:

fork
create index1
create index2
exit

fork
create index3
create index4
exit

wait for termination
exit

As my test tables are small and indexing happens almost instantly, I put a
'sleep' after one of the forks so that the two don't complete at the same
time. When I do that, I don't get the errors.

Wes