Re: pg_dump and not MVCC-safe commands

My question:
What happens if not MVCC-safe command committed after snapshot but before lock?

On Mon, May 20, 2024 at 12:33 PM Guillaume Lelarge
<guillaume@lelarge.info> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> Le lun. 20 mai 2024 à 11:27, PetSerAl <petseral@gmail.com> a écrit :
>>
>> How pg_dump interact with not MVCC-safe commands?
>>
>> As I understand, pg_dump first take snapshot and then lock all tables
>> it intended to dump. What happens if not MVCC-safe command committed
>> after snapshot but before lock? From comment to pg_dump.c I understand
>> that it may fail with 'cache lookup failed' error. But, can it happen,
>> that pg_dump not fail, but instead capture inconsistent dump? For
>> example TRUNCATE committed after snapshot and pg_dump will see result
>> of TRUNCATE but not result of other commands in TRUNCATE transaction?
>>
>>
>
> You can't truncate an already existing table while pg_dump is running. TRUNCATE needs an exclusive lock, and pg_dump
alreadyhas a lock on all tables of the database it's dumping. So TRUNCATE will be blocked until pg_dump finishes all
itswork. 
>
> (The same will happen for VACUUM FULL, CLUSTER and some (all?) ALTER TABLE commands.)
>
>
> --
> Guillaume.