Thread: Any way to figure out why a session stopped?

Greetings-

I was running a large job, started on Wednesday evening. The job, which
used a perl script and DBI to do some manipulation and pattern extraction
from full-text documents in a PostgreSQL database (version 7.1.3, running
on debian linux), stopped about 1/3 of the way through its task.

Unfortunately, I don't still have the window open from which I ran the
script. Is there any way to figure out why it stopped, and thereby fix the
problem? There's nothing very illuminating in /var/log/postgres.log, and
from psql I can insert rows into all the tables, so I don't think it was
an issue of the tables growing too big.  However, they are very big, so if
that rings any bells let me know:

auth=# select count(*) from patterns;
  count
---------
 2720343
(1 row)

auth=# select count(*) from pattern_occurrences;
  count
---------
 3176859
(1 row)


There is, though, plenty of disk space for them to play with:

aperrin@hm269-26876:~$ df /var/lib/postgres/data
Filesystem           1k-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3              9614148   3675684   5450088  41% /


----------------------------------------------------------------------
Andrew J Perrin - andrew_perrin@unc.edu - http://www.unc.edu/~aperrin
 Assistant Professor of Sociology, U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
      269 Hamilton Hall, CB#3210, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3210 USA

On Thursday, January 3, 2002, at 07:13 PM, Andrew Perrin wrote:

> Greetings-
>
> I was running a large job, started on Wednesday evening. The job, which
> used a perl script and DBI to do some manipulation and pattern
> extraction
> from full-text documents in a PostgreSQL database (version 7.1.3,
> running
> on debian linux), stopped about 1/3 of the way through its task.
>
> Unfortunately, I don't still have the window open from which I ran the
> script. Is there any way to figure out why it stopped,

perldoc DBI will tell you:

<quote>

"trace"
              DBI->trace($trace_level)
              DBI->trace($trace_level, $trace_filename)

            DBI trace information can be enabled for all handles
            using the "trace" DBI class method. To enable trace
            information for a specific handle, use the similar
            "$h-">"trace" method described elsewhere.

            Trace levels are as follows:

              0 - Trace disabled.
              1 - Trace DBI method calls returning with results or
errors.
              2 - Trace method entry with parameters and returning
with results.
              3 - As above, adding some high-level information
from the driver
                  and some internal information from the DBI.
              4 - As above, adding more detailed information from
the driver.
                  Also includes DBI mutex information when using
threaded Perl.
              5 and above - As above but with more and more
obscure information.

            Trace level 1 is best for a simple overview of what's
            happening.

</quote>