Re: [Fwd: Weird backup file]

Tom Lane wrote:

> Your procedure was fine, but ALTER TABLE RENAME was mighty flaky in
> pre-7.0 releases.  Even in 7.0, doing it inside a transaction block is
> asking for trouble (that's finally fixed for 7.1, thank goodness).
> I suspect you got bit by an ALTER bug.  I'm not sure about the exact
> mechanism, but I have a suspicion: it looks a lot like some blocks
> of the original ellipse_cell_proc table got written into the new table.
> I know 6.5 failed to clear old shared disk buffers during a table
> rename.  I can't recall if it was sloppy about that during a table drop
> as well, but it would've taken both bugs to cause this result if I'm
> guessing right that that was the failure path.
>
> There are good reasons why we've been urging people to update to 7.0.*
> ASAP ... I'm afraid you got bit by one :-(.  Sorry about that.
>
>

Okay. At least the problem has been solved. It seems though that the last 2
times I've done a backup (in order to upgrade to the latest Postgres version)
I've had data lost because of some error. I'm getting a little concerned
about the quality of the Postgres backups.

-Tony


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