Re: Corruption (Was: Re: Why Not MySQL?) - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Tue, 2 May 2000, The Hermit Hacker wrote:

> 
> As Don asks, what happened with the v7.0 trials you were doing?  Corrupted
> indices, I've seen occasionally in older versions, but I can't recall ever
> seeing corrupt system tables ...
> 
> I don't have a GUI browser right, so searching the archives is kinda tough
> for me :(  Can you refresh my memory for me?  There has to be something
> logical to this, as to what the cause for the corruption is :(
> 
> >From Don's comment, I take it you are using FreeBSD?  Version?  Stability
> of the machine?  Never crashes?
> 
> Version of PostgreSQL?  Compile/configure options?  Do you have any core
> files in your data/base/* hierarchy that would be the result of a backend
> crashing?  
> 
> I know you are looking at alternatives, but I'm terrible at letting go of
> problems :(

His description of table corruption and the system running slower and
slower sounds like a disk going bad.   I've seen it hundreds of times
on news machines.  Constant retries while trying to write to the disk
will give slowdowns.  Having data on a spot of the disk that's unreliable
will certainly cause data integrity problems.  

Mitch, have you thoroughly checked the hardware?  

Vince.


> 
> 
> On Tue, 2 May 2000, Mitch Vincent wrote:
> 
> > A very, very good article. I love the comment about MySQL being a filesystem
> > with an SQL interface :-)
> > 
> > However.. I'm faced with a huge dilemma.
> > 
> > We use PostgreSQL for a fairly large application I wrote, the database is
> > still pretty small, it carries info on about 25-30,000 people and about
> > 5,000 jobs. Recently we've had huge trouble with PostgreSQL -- it seems that
> > every month I stump someone with the obscure things that happen to our data
> > :-)
> > 
> > >From corrupted indexes to corrupted system tables, it's almost always
> > unrecoverable. Luckily I always have a backup to restore from and the world
> > goes on... We've only recently started to notice that the backend is slowing
> > down. It seems that with every additional applicant added it get
> > exponentially slower... So, sadly I have to go find another backend for this
> > application -- a commercial one too so we can get "commercial support"
> > (yuck)..
> > 
> > So, could you guys suggest some other backends I might look into? I know
> > it's an odd place for me to ask but the flat truth is that I think *I* am to
> > blame for my Postgres troubles and even taking all of the problems into
> > account I think PG is the best damn free RDBMS out there. It's functionality
> > is superior to everyone else's, it's developers are no less than amazing and
> > well -- I trust you guys to give me some honest opinions.. The functionality
> > I need is basically what PG has.. Transactions are a must as well as some
> > sort of sequence -- stability over performance but performance is very
> > important too. It also needs to run native on FreeBSD..
> > 
> > Oracle is out as we use FreeBSD and someone out there decided that they
> > wouldn't support FreeBSD (in the license as well as in the code!)..
> > 
> > Thanks guys, especially to all who tried to help in private (Don, Tom --
> > many others)..
> > 
> > -Mitch
> > 
> > ----- Original Message -----
> > From: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>
> > To: Don Baccus <dhogaza@pacifier.com>
> > Cc: <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
> > Sent: Tuesday, May 02, 2000 5:55 PM
> > Subject: Re: [HACKERS] Why Not MySQL?
> > 
> > 
> > > >
> > > > >Actually, I'm changing the link
> > > > >
> > > > >http://openacs.org/why-not-mysql.html
> > > >
> > > > Moments after forwarding the link to Ben's piece on why
> > > > MySQL sucks to this list, he e-mailed me the above note.
> > > >
> > > > Sorry for any inconvenience...
> > >
> > > I am adding this to the FAQ.
> > >
> > > --
> > >   Bruce Momjian                        |  http://www.op.net/~candle
> > >   pgman@candle.pha.pa.us               |  (610) 853-3000
> > >   +  If your life is a hard drive,     |  830 Blythe Avenue
> > >   +  Christ can be your backup.        |  Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania 19026
> > >
> > 
> 
> Marc G. Fournier                   ICQ#7615664               IRC Nick: Scrappy
> Systems Administrator @ hub.org 
> primary: scrappy@hub.org           secondary: scrappy@{freebsd|postgresql}.org 
> 
> 
> 

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