Re: Cygwin PostgreSQL Regression Test Problems

Jason Tishler <Jason.Tishler@dothill.com> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2001 at 12:39:59PM -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>> However --- I suppose Windows can't cope with deleting a file someone
>> else is holding open, either?

> Yes.

>> That would cause significantly bigger problems :-(

> That sounds ominous, please elaborate.

If you drop a table that someone else has recently used, the someone
else's backend is probably still holding the file open.  We generally
don't close open file descriptors until we have to.

In current sources I think that you'd get a "cannot unlink" NOTICE,
but the table would get logically dropped anyway, and the sole
side-effect would be failure to recover the disk space.  But in this
case we could be talking about large amounts of disk space.

            regards, tom lane