Re: Online Backups: Minor Caveat, Major Addition?

On Mar 20, 2006, at 4:48 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> "Thomas F. O'Connell" <tfo@sitening.com> writes:
>> A base backup taken from a running postmaster will still include a
>> postmaster.pid file, which will prevent a new postmaster from being
>> able to be started.
>
> Usually not; only if the PID mentioned in the file belongs to an
> existing process belonging to the postgres userid does Postgres
> believe
> that the pidfile is valid.
>
> It might be worth mentioning this as you suggest, but I think it's a
> sufficiently low-probability case that your failure was probably
> due to
> something else.

My test scenario involved setting up a new cluster on the same
machine as the base postgres I was attempting to recover. So you're
probably right about the rarity.

What about the larger suggested change of breaking that section into
three more granular subsections? I could see commentary being
slightly more helpful for each.

--
Thomas F. O'Connell
Database Architecture and Programming
Co-Founder
Sitening, LLC

http://www.sitening.com/
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