Re: A Haunted Database

Do you have any automated program accessing the database overnight?  IE a
malfunctioning backup or vacuum script?  You might also want to do a diff
-C1 first_dump second_dump to see what is actually being changed.

At 11:40 AM 4/8/00, Robert Cleveland wrote:
>Here's a mystery I hope someone can solve for me.
>
>We are entering blocks of HTML into a table called bodyparts. We use PHP3 to
>break up these blocks into several chunks to keep the length below the
>maximum. When the end user calls up the section, the "bodyparts" are
>extracted and re-assembled.
>
>The output pages work fine . . . for a while. We set up the output pages
>during the day, check them for accuracy and go to bed thinking we have done
>a great job. Then , in the middle of the night, something happens and when
>we awake, we find the HTML has been scrambled like so many breakfast eggs.
>Not all sections are scrambled. In fact it is the same sections every single
>time. So we re-enter the data, check it, assume we are done, and then the
>same thing happens the next day.
>
>To gather some empirical evidence, I ran pg_dump at 7pm on the offending
>table. I check the output pages at midnight the same evening, and they all
>were good. When I got back in front of the computer at 9am, the pages were
>scrambled again. I ran pg_dump a second time to a separate file. The file
>sizes were different (insert scary music here). No one had touched the
>database or the pages.
>
>I reloaded the data and everything is back to normal. But I suspect it will
>happen again tonight and I am afraid. Does anyone know what inhuman entity
>might be causing this to occur?
>
>