Re: Assert failure due to "drop schema pg_temp_3 cascade" for temporary tables and \d+ is not showing any info after drooping temp table schema

On Fri, Dec 27, 2019 at 4:06 AM Michael Paquier <michael(at)paquier(dot)xyz> wrote:
> And committed down to 9.4. We use much more "temporary schema" in
> error messages actually, so I have switched to that.

I think this was a bad idea and that it should be reverted. It seems
to me that the problem here is that you introduced a feature which had
a bug, namely that it couldn't tolerate concurrency, and when somebody
discovered the bug, you "fixed" it not by making the code able to
tolerate concurrent activity but by preventing concurrent activity
from happening in the first place. I think that's wrong on general
principle.

In this specific case, DROP SCHEMA on another temporary sessions's
schema is a feature which has existed for a very long time and which I
have used on multiple occasions to repair damaged databases. Suppose,
for example, there's a catalog entry that prevents the schema from
being dropped. Before this commit, you could fix it or delete the
entry and then retry the drop. Now, you can't. You can maybe wait for
autovacuum to retry it or something, assuming autovacuum is working
and you're in multi-user mode.

But even if that weren't the case, this seems like a very fragile fix.
Maybe someday we'll allow multiple autovacuum workers in the same
database, and the problem comes back. Maybe some user who can't drop
the schema because of this arbitrary prohibition will find themselves
forced to delete the pg_namespace row by hand and then crash the
server. Most server code is pretty careful that to either tolerate
missing system catalog tuples or elog(ERROR), not crash (e.g. cache
lookup failed for ...). This code shouldn't be an exception to that
rule.

Also, as a matter of procedure, 3 days from first post to commit is
not a lot, especially when the day something is posted is Christmas
Eve.

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company