Re: rebuilding a table from a datafile

Ross J. Reedstrom writes:

> On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 02:36:10PM +0000, brianb-pggeneral@edsamail.com wrote:
> >
> > This is with regards to Postgres 6.5.
> >
> > While trying to ALTER RENAME a large table (203MB data file), an error
> > occured. \d displays the new table name, but there is no corresponding
> > file.  a file with the original table name still exists, so presumably the
> > data is not lost. Is it possible for me to undo the RENAME by massaging the
> > pg_* tables, or otherwise retrieve the data in the table? It was an
> > insert-only table, and no deletes or updates were ever performed on it.
>
> Hmm, what kind of failure mode caused this? Reading the renamrel code for
> 6.5.3, it does the file rename first, then updates pg_class. Anyway,
> I'd try manually renaming the file to the name that appears in pg_class,
> rather than trying to fixup the system relations. There're indices on
> pg_class that're hard to rebuild under 6.5.X.
>
> If that doesn't work, try updating pg_class.relname to mach the filename.
> you'll need to be a DB superuser to do that.

I am getting a "ERROR:  cannot find attribute 1 of relation foo" when I try
to SELECT * from the table. Also, \d foo produces "Couldn't find table
foo!", but it is listed in pg_class.

Is it safe/advisable to modify pg_attribute directly in this case? I have
several other tables with the exact same structure that I can use as
reference.

Brian
--
Brian Baquiran <brianb@edsamail.com>
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