Thread: More than 1 pg_database Entry for Database - Thread #2

Howdy,

I am running version 8.3.3 and encountered a problem with my pg_dump failing a couple weeks back with the following error:

pg_dump: query returned more than one (2) pg_database entry for database "sqlsnbs"

pg_dumpall: pg_dump failed on database "sqlsnbs", exiting

I followed your thread here:

http://www.mail-archive.com/pgsql-admin@postgresql.org/msg25978.html

in an attempt to resolve the problem and in the end, just like was stated in the above thread, I ended up dumping the old Postgres environment into a new initialized one to resolve the problem.

I did not capture the queries I was running at the time of diagnosing but I can summarize.  I ran the following query:

select xmin, cmin, xmax, cmax, oid, ctid, datname from pg_database;

which returned the same oid and different xmax for each row of the duplicate database.  One xmax was 0 and the other was 3.7 billion.  In your thread above it was stated by Tom Lane that the large xmax number may indicate a problem with xid wraparound and that the problem row was never vacuumed away due to broken vacuuming procedures.  We were running with auto-vacuum turned on and I verified that it was working by querying pg_stat_all_tables.

I was wondering if you could please answer the following for me to help mitigate this in the future:

1.  Should I be running a scheduled vacuum analyze in addition to the auto-vacuum?

2.  Should I be running a scheduled vacuum full?

3.  Does 8.4 address this problem?

Thank you,

Sam