Re: indexes no longer used after shutdown during reindexing

On Wed, Jan 11, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Matt Dew <mattd(at)consistentstate(dot)com> wrote:
> Hello all,
>   I have a database that was shut down, cleanly, during an 'reindex table'
>  command.  When the database came back up, queries against that table
> started doing sequential scans instead of using the indexes as they had been
> up until that point.
>
> We tried:
> 1) vacuuming the table (vacuum tblName)
> 2) reindexing the table (reindex table tblName)
> 3) dropping and recreating the indexes
>
> but none of those actions helped.   We ended up recreating the table by
> renaming the table and doing a create table as select * from oldTable and
> readding the indexes.  This worked.
>
> This problem presented itself as an application timing out. It took several
> people, several hours to track this down and solve it.
>
> Several months ago I had two other tables also stopped using their indexes.
>  Those times however I don't know if a database shutdown caused the problem.
>
> Has anyone had this problem?  If so, what specifically is the cause?  Is
> shutting down a database during a table rebuild or vacuum an absolute no-no?
>
> Any and all help or insight would be appreciated,
> Matt

You likely had an invalid index, I've seen that crop up when doing a
create index concurrently. Just a guess. What did or does \d of the
table and its indexes show? Look for invalid in the output.