Re: Heavily fragmented table and index data in 8.0.3 - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Heavily fragmented table and index data in 8.0.3
Date
Msg-id 10344.1213287336@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Heavily fragmented table and index data in 8.0.3  (Zoltan Boszormenyi <zb@cybertec.at>)
List pgsql-general
Zoltan Boszormenyi <zb@cybertec.at> writes:
> Tom Lane �rta:
>> What that sounds like to me is a corrupt index (infinite loop of
>> right-links, perhaps).  Have you tried REINDEXing the table?

> How can such an infinite loop sneak into an index?
> Hardware is from Sun, not a grocery store PC, so I don't suppose it to
> be faulty.
> Is there anything in the 8.0.x series that fixes this (or a similar) bug?
> If I could point to something in the release notes, I may get them to
> upgrade
> and they may upgrade to a newer generation even.

Well, for instance there's this bug fixed in 8.0.6:
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-01/msg00206.php

The discussion there only covers what would happen when the bug
manifests on a plain heap relation.  I don't think we ever worked out
what would happen in an index ... but it seems fairly clear that
you would end up with two places linking to the same page, and that
might net out to being a loop, depending...

In any case, there are enough known bugs in 8.0.3 that I hardly
think there needs to be any debate about whether they need to update.

            regards, tom lane

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