Re: pg_inherits: not found, but visible

On Tue, 20 Mar 2001, Tom Lane wrote:

> Joel Burton <jburton@scw.org> writes:
> >> and I could find a $PGDATA/base/18720/16567 file.
> >> Could you find such a file ?
> 
> > No. I do have the db directory, and all of the other file for the existing
> > classes, but not this.
> 
> Hm.  You could make an empty file by that name (just 'touch' it) and
> then you'd probably be able to dump (possibly after reindexing
> pg_inherit's indexes again).  pg_inherits isn't a real critical table,
> fortunately.
> 
> > Any ideas why this would disappear?
>
> Interesting question, all right.  Did you have a system crash?

Ok, so I touched the file, and did a postgres -P -O reindex of the table
with force.

Going into psql then, I could select * from the table, and, not
surprisingly, nothing was in it, but I can (& did) dump my data.

For those watching, that's about 15 minutes from the sinking feeling of
'I just lost two days of work' to 'resolution and data restored'. Our
community has *damn fine* technical support! :-) Thanks, Tom, and Hiroshi,
for being so helpful so quickly.


As for your questions, no, I didn't have a system crash. I was running a
Zope page that queries several tables (show all classes, for each class,
show all instances, for each instance, show all dates, etc.); the page
normally takes about 2 minutes to pull everything together (I think that's
Zope's speed issue, not PG!) Anyway, while that was chugging away, I tried
to drop a view and recreate it, and that request just hung there for a
few minutes. The Zope page never came up, and psql notified me that I lost
my connection.

I wasn't, and haven't ever, used inheritance in this database.

-- 
Joel Burton   <jburton@scw.org>
Director of Information Systems, Support Center of Washington