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

The Missing Piece in AI Coding: Automated Context Discovery

I recently switched tasks from writing the ColBERT Live! library and related benchmarking tools to authoring BM25 search for Cassandra . I was able to implement the former almost entirely with "coding in English" via Aider . That is: I gave the LLM tasks, in English, and it generated diffs for me that Aider applied to my source files. This made me easily 5x more productive vs writing code by hand, even with AI autocomplete like Copilot. It felt amazing! (Take a minute to check out this short thread on a real-life session with Aider , if you've never tried it.) Coming back to Cassandra, by contrast, felt like swimming through molasses. Doing everything by hand is tedious when you know that an LLM could do it faster if you could just structure the problem correctly for it. It felt like writing assembly without a compiler -- a useful skill in narrow situations, but mostly not a good use of human intelligence today. The key difference in these two sce...
Post a Comment
Read more

A week of Windows Subsystem for Linux

I first experimented with WSL2 as a daily development environment two years ago. Things were still pretty rough around the edges, especially with JetBrains' IDEs, and I ended up buying a dedicated Linux workstation so I wouldn't have to deal with the pain.  Unfortunately, the Linux box developed a heat management problem, and simultaneously I found myself needing a beefier GPU than it had for working on multi-vector encoding , so I decided to give WSL2 another try. Here's some of the highlights and lowlights. TLDR, it's working well enough that I'm probably going to continue using it as my primary development machine going forward. The Good NVIDIA CUDA drivers just work. I was blown away that I ran conda install cuda -c nvidia and it worked the first try. No farting around with Linux kernel header versions or arcane errors from nvidia-smi. It just worked, including with PyTorch. JetBrains products work a lot better now in remote development mod...
Post a Comment
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