Re: "relation deleted while in use" encountered with Postgresql 8.0.8

On Nov 29, 2007 4:44 PM, Gautam Sampathkumar  wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm using a python script w/ the PyGreSQL library to insert 1 billion rows
> into a database table for an experiment (performing a commit every 10K
> rows). My script failed at about 170M rows with the following exception:
>
>    File "/usr/lib64/python2.3/site-packages/pgdb.py", line 163, in execute
>      self.executemany(operation, (params,))
>    File "/usr/lib64/python2.3/site-packages/pgdb.py", line 185, in
> executemany
>      raise DatabaseError, "error '%s' in '%s'" % ( msg, sql )
>  pg.DatabaseError: error 'ERROR:  relation 184577 deleted while still in use
>  ' in 'INSERT INTO nfs_files_10 (mxid, fhInode, fhGen, fhSnapId, fhFlags,
> name, parentInode, parentGen, parentSnapId, parentFlags, extension, type,
> atime, mtime, fileSize, owner, generation) VALUES (10, 120, 927370846, 0, 0,
> 'gummy0.txt', 1204041, 927370729, 0, 0, 'txt', 0, 1112147234, 1112147234,
> 40960, NULL, 2);'
>
>
> After this error, my database table no longer exists and appeared to have
> been dropped, although my script was doing only INSERT statements. Any ideas
> on what might be causing this and/or if this a known issue and possible
> solutions would be greatly appreciated.

When you hear hoofbeats, don't think zebra...  This is not a common problem.

Is this repeatable reliably?  Are there other people connected to this
database?  Are you logging queries?  What, if anything, have you done
to make your postgresql installation "unique" from a default one,
including any monitoring scripts and things like that?