Re: strange behavior (corruption?) of large production

Tom Lane wrote:
> Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com> writes:
> 
>>We have very strange behavior from an internal production database.
>>There are multiple symptoms, all pointing to a problem with clusterwide 
>>tables. For example:
> 
> 
> "psql -l" really should produce the same results as doing "\l" in the
> template1 database.  Does it? 

Sorry -- on my last post "psql -l" was pointing to the wrong place.

postgres@csdfds1:~> psql -p 5433 -l    List of databases Name | Owner | Encoding
------+-------+----------
(0 rows)

postgres@csdfds1:~> psql -U postgres -p 5433 template1
Welcome to psql 7.4.8, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.

Type:  \copyright for distribution terms       \h for help with SQL commands       \? for help on internal slash
commands      \g or terminate with semicolon to execute query       \q to quit
 

template1=# \l    List of databases Name | Owner | Encoding
------+-------+----------
(0 rows)

So they agree in template1 and cyspec databases.


> If so, the next thing to look at is probably whether the pg_class and pg_attribute entries for pg_database
> look the same in template1 and in cyspec.  Similarly you could compare
> what pg_shadow looks like from different databases, and what the local
> system tables have as entries for it.

Did that - they look the same. We did a simple cat 1262 | less
to view the contents of pg_database and indeed the data looks to be 
there. Similarly a simple cat of the pg_shadow relfilenode shows the 
colprod user. Is it possible that we have corrupted shared memory, and a 
database restart will fix the problem? We didn't want to restart until 
the forensics were done.

Joe