Re: [HACKERS] DISTINCT ON: speak now or forever hold your peace

Adriaan Joubert <a.joubert@albourne.com> writes:
> I've been using DISTINCT to fix things when vacuum gets into a mess (yes, it
> happened again last night,
> FATAL 1:  VACUUM (vc_rpfheap): BlowawayRelationBuffers returned -2
> ). I then have loads of duplicates in a table and by doing a SELECT DISTINCT
> ... INTO ... I can get rid of them. A few table renames later I'm back in
> business. So how do I do this without DISTINCT?

I didn't say anything about eliminating SELECT DISTINCT; I was talking
about SELECT DISTINCT ON, which is a whole 'nother thing.

> Better would be of course to get rid of the BlowawayRelationBuffers problem.

Quite so.  I think this is fixed for 7.0 ... that error message
indicates a buffer refcount leak, and I fixed several problems
along that line a couple months ago.  We shall see if I got 'em
all or not ...
        regards, tom lane