Skip to main content

corrupting postgresql

Carnage Blender ran out of space on its root partition Saturday. This is also the partition that has the postgresql data on it (WAL on a separate disk). Bad news: data from a few tables just disappeared in total violation of referential constraints. (Perhaps MVCC marked the old row as invalid for an UPDATE, but couldn't create the new row. Just guessing.)

This post seems to indicate that this was fixed for 8.0, although it may have gotten into one of the later 7.x releases (CB is still running the ancient-by-postgresql-standards 7.4.2 release, just over a year old) as well. Changelogs don't mention it specifically though.

I've rearranged disk usage so this won't happen again, but looking at the list of bugfixes through 7.4.7 I guess I should schedule some downtime to upgrade. Now that 8.0 has its first point release I should probably just bite the bullet and dump/reload to that. Unfortunately, Carnage Blender runs two multi-gig databases now, each with several circular dependencies that make necessary manual fiddling with the dumps before restoring.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Doh! That's actually odd though cause I have run out of space before on postgresql and not lost any data.

One thing I wanted to mention was that you ought to wait for 8.0.2 to come out before you upgrade. It has some pretty big changes in it (for a patch release) so is probably worth waiting for (should be out within the next week) As always if you can, make sure you use the most recent pg_dump and try to test a reload of your db before making the switch. (Hey, another alternative might be to use slony to replicate the data onto the new version and then flip the switch)
12:29 PM
Tim Lesher said…
That will teach you to rely on Postgres. You really need to upgrade to MySQL.
5:28 PM
Jonathan Ellis said…
Smile when you say that... :)
7:05 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

PyCon Python IDE review

I presented an IDE review at PyCon last Friday. It was basically a re-review of what I thought were the 3 most promising IDEs from the Utah Python User Group IDE review , to which I added SPE, which was by far the most popular of the ones we left out that time. The versions reviewed are: PyDev 1.0.2 SPE 0.8.2.a Komodo 3.5.2 Wing IDE 2.1 beta 1 I'd intended to base my presentation around a comparison of writing a smallish program in each of the IDEs, but the more I tried to make this not suck, the more I realized it was a losing proposition. Instead, I decided to try to focus on the features in each that most set them apart from the others (both positive and negative); this seemed more likely be useful. (I did a new feature matrix for this review, which is included after my comments. The slides I used are also up, at http://utahpython.org/jellis/pycon-ides.pdf , but aren't very useful absent video of the presentation itself. Hence this post.) PyDev PyDev has g...
43 comments
Read more

Why PHP sucks

(July 8 2005) Apparently I got linked by some PHP sites, and while there were a few well-reasoned comments here I mostly just got people who only knew PHP reacting like I told them their firstborn was ugly. These people tended to give variants on one or more themes: All environments have warts, so PHP is no worse than anything else in this respect I can work around PHP's problems, ergo they are not really problems You aren't experienced enough in PHP to judge it yet As to the first, it is true that PHP is not alone in having warts. However, the lack of qualitative difference does not mean that the quantitative difference is insignificant. Similarly, problems can be worked around, but languages/environments designed by people with more foresight and, to put it bluntly, clue, simply don't make the kind of really boneheaded architecture mistakes that you can't help but run into on a daily baisis in PHP. Finally, as I noted in my original introduction, with PHP, ...
30 comments
Read more

A review of 6 Python IDEs

(March 2006: you may also be interested the updated review I did for PyCon -- http://spyced.blogspot.com/2006/02/pycon-python-ide-review.html .) For September's meeting, the Utah Python User Group hosted an IDE shootout. 5 presenters reviewed 6 IDEs: PyDev 0.9.8.1 Eric3 3.7.1 Boa Constructor 0.4.4 BlackAdder 1.1 Komodo 3.1 Wing IDE 2.0.3 (The windows version was tested for all but Eric3, which was tested on Linux. Eric3 is based on Qt, which basically means you can't run it on Windows unless you've shelled out $$$ for a commerical Qt license, since there is no GPL version of Qt for Windows. Yes, there's Qt Free , but that's not exactly production-ready software.) Perhaps the most notable IDEs not included are SPE and DrPython. Alas, nobody had time to review these, but if you're looking for a free IDE perhaps you should include these in your search, because PyDev was the only one of the 3 free ones that we'd consider using. And if you aren...
36 comments
Read more