Re: pg_rawdump - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Stephen R. van den Berg
Subject Re: pg_rawdump
Date
Msg-id 20101020084428.GD15684@cuci.nl
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: pg_rawdump  (Roberto Mello <roberto.mello@gmail.com>)
Responses Re: pg_rawdump
List pgsql-hackers
Roberto Mello wrote:
>On Tue, Oct 19, 2010 at 6:13 PM, Stephen R. van den Berg <srb@cuci.nl> wrote:
>> Greg Stark wrote:
>>>premise this on the idea that you've lost everything in the catalog
>>>but not the data in other tables. Which seems like a narrow use case.

>> It happens, more often than you'd think. ??My client had it, I've
>> seen numerous google hits which show the same.

>It happened to us recently when a customer had disk issues, and we

It usually happens when there are disk issues, that's exactly what it is for.

>A tool like Stephen is proposing would most likely have helped us
>recover at least some or most of the data, I would hope.

Well, because the customer could recreate (within reason) the original
table definitions, we were able to recover all of his data (12 tables,
including some toasted/compressed).

It's just that matching table and file, and subsequently figuring out
some missing columns which may have been added/removed later,
can be rather timeconsuming and could be made a lot easier (not necessarily
perfect) if that information would have been present in the first page of
a file.
-- 
Stephen.

Life is that brief interlude between nothingness and eternity.


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