Re: pg_internal.init is hazardous to your health

On Tue, 2006-10-17 at 22:29 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Dirk Lutzebaeck and I just spent a tense couple of hours trying to
> figure out why a large database Down Under wasn't coming up after being
> reloaded from a base backup plus PITR recovery.  The symptoms were that
> the recovery went fine, but backend processes would fail at startup or
> soon after with "could not open relation XX/XX/XX: No such file" type of
> errors.

Understand the tension...

> The answer that ultimately emerged was that they'd been running a
> nightly maintenance script that did REINDEX SYSTEM (among other things
> I suppose).  The PITR base backup included pg_internal.init files that
> were appropriate when it was taken, and the PITR recovery process did
> nothing whatsoever to update 'em :-(.  So incoming backends picked up
> init files with obsolete relfilenode values.

OK, I'm looking at this now for later discussion.

--  Simon Riggs              EnterpriseDB   http://www.enterprisedb.com