Re: Strange deletion problem

You could create a statement level delete trigger on the relevant table,
then get it to snapshot all the contents of the pg_stat_activity table
(which will show all running queries) into some sort of log table.

If you look at the plpgsql documentation (part of the postgresql manual
for your release) there is a section on triggers and an example on
maintaining a summary table; this is sort of the pattern you want to adopt,
except that what you insert into the "summary" table will be something
like:

"insert into my_table_delete_log (select * from pg_stat_activity where
current_query not like '%<IDLE>%');"

If you want to run something similar at the row level instead, beware that
you may then see it trigger 15K times and thus you could end up with 15K
copies of the active queries ...

You might also want to add a sequence column to your log table so you can
be sure which order the queries were inserted, although if you're using
statement level logging, you'll should see distinct query and backend start
timestamps anyway.

Just an idea - never tried it myself - so probably best to test it out on
a test database of some sort first!

Cheers,
Robin

On Tue, 30 Mar 2010 22:51:46 +0100, "John Lister"
<john(dot)lister-ps(at)kickstone(dot)com> wrote:
> 2010/3/30 John Lister <john(dot)lister-ps(at)kickstone(dot)com>
>
> Hi, I have a table which is constantly updated through out the day
> with no problems, I'm running Postgresql 8.3.8 in ubuntu karmic.
> However, within the last week for some reason overnight it is being
> emptied and I can't work out why. I've set
log_min_duration_statement
> to 0 so that postgresql dumps out every query made to the db but it
> hasn't brought anything up. During the period between from when I
know
> the table is ok to the next morning when it is empty I can see
entries
> in the logs for the expected 200 or so deletions, but during this
> period approx 15k rows are removed. The odd thing is that there is
> nothing else in the logs that references the table (I've looked for
the
> obvious deletion and trunctate statements).
>
> The table is modified using JDBC prepared statements so I see 3
> entries for each of the expected delete statements (parse, bind,
> execute) and the statement is as follows:
>
> delete from product_list where retailer_id=? and product_id=?
>
>
> Therefore I have a few questions:
> - Is there any other statements that could be causing the rows to be
> removed that I've missed
> - Is there anything that could be deleting them without generating a
> log entry for the statement?
> - Is it possible that data corruption of either the index/table is
> making my delete statements removed more rows?
> - Is it a possibly bug?
>
>
>
> Hi,
> - maybe there are some other settings for this database (they are not
> stored in the file), check the pg_settings table in the database
> - maybe you're looking in a wrong log file - sometimes do (they change
> from time to time - depending on the configuration)
> - ensure that the logging is done to file and to THIS file, because
> there are more logging settings than just log_min_duration and
sometimes
> it can be messed up
> - try to restart the database and see if there isn't any other file
> created as usually I observe that after deleting current log file, the
> database doesn't recreate while logging so the logs are not stored.
>
> Cheers for replying, I've checked the config and nothing seems to be
> amiss, as I'm running ubuntu the defaults seem to be to dump to stderr
and
> somehow this is redirect to the log file, there doesn't seem to be any
> other log files used - although it is possible the ubuntu startup
scripts
> inject the logfile on startup?
> Unfortunately I can't restart the database easily, whatever changed
seemed
> to have happened on friday without a restart so I'm hoping I can find
and
> undo it...
>
> John