Upgrade to 8.3.0?

Started by Shane Wrightabout 18 years ago7 messagesgeneral
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#1Shane Wright
shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com

Hi,

I'm considering an upgrade to 8.3.0 for some internal databases - would
normally wait until at least .1 release of anything for safety but
there's a lot of nice sounding stuff here!

After trawling the bug logs and doing some testing on some servers here
all looks ok except for this bug around VACUUM FULL and HOT tables:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-bugs/2008-02/msg00068.php

So my questions are thus...

- Is the HOT/VACUUMFULL bug above dangerous or is its biggest
side-effect an error until a non-full vacuum is run?

- Has anyone spotted anyone else that would discourage an
upgrade at this stage?

If it helps, our use of SQL is fairly basic - nothing fancy, and nothing
Postgres-specific.

Any help appreciated,

Thanks

Shane

#2Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Shane Wright (#1)
Re: Upgrade to 8.3.0?

"Shane Wright" <shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com> writes:

- Is the HOT/VACUUMFULL bug above dangerous or is its biggest
side-effect an error until a non-full vacuum is run?

As long as you don't build with --enable-cassert, that bug isn't real
nasty. Especially if you don't do VACUUM FULL routinely ;-)

regards, tom lane

#3Shane Wright
shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com
In reply to: Shane Wright (#1)
Re: Upgrade to 8.3.0?

Tom

Many thanks :)

I've tried to find this out for myself but have failed :(

I'm assuming that the default RPMs for RHEL 4 (on ftp.postgresql.org) are not built with --enable-cassert - and that I can veryify this by using the same reproduction case you demonstrated in the bug history?

(I should just get the memory allocation error on attempting to vacuum full - instead of an assertion failing and bringing down the whole PostgreSQL server (panic?))

Please could you confirm my assertion (sic) is correct?

(I get this behaviour on my test server and all appears to be ok)

Kind regards

Shane

________________________________

From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us]
Sent: Fri 29/02/2008 19:46
To: Shane Wright
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Upgrade to 8.3.0?

Shane Wright writes:

- Is the HOT/VACUUMFULL bug above dangerous or is its biggest
side-effect an error until a non-full vacuum is run?

As long as you don't build with --enable-cassert, that bug isn't real
nasty. Especially if you don't do VACUUM FULL routinely ;-)

regards, tom lane

#4Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Shane Wright (#3)
Re: Upgrade to 8.3.0?

"Shane Wright" <shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com> writes:

I'm assuming that the default RPMs for RHEL 4 (on ftp.postgresql.org) are not built with --enable-cassert - and that I can veryify this by using the same reproduction case you demonstrated in the bug history?

I believe they aren't, but you could check by seeing what pg_config
reports as the configure options; or even more directly by seeing if
it will let you "SET debug_assertions TO on".

regards, tom lane

#5Shane Wright
shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com
In reply to: Shane Wright (#1)
Re: Upgrade to 8.3.0?

hmm - I don't suppose the RHEL builds already include your patch against this issue? If so I guess it would be useful to know :)

I've run through the steps you outlined to reproduce the fault on a new box (after having reproduced it successfully on test servers), and it does not show the problem:

[root@XXXXXXX data]# !psql
psql test -U XXXXX
Welcome to psql 8.3.0, the PostgreSQL interactive terminal.
Type: \copyright for distribution terms
\h for help with SQL commands
\? for help with psql commands
\g or terminate with semicolon to execute query
\q to quit
test=# create table foo as select null::int as x from generate_series(1,2000) x;
SELECT
test=# delete from foo;
DELETE 2000
test=# select count(*) from foo;
count
-------
0
(1 row)
test=# vacuum full foo;
VACUUM
test=#
test=# set debug_assertions to on;
ERROR: assertion checking is not supported by this build
test=#

The RPMs installed from are these:

postgresql-8.3.0-1PGDG.rhel4
postgresql-libs-8.3.0-1PGDG.rhel4
postgresql-server-8.3.0-1PGDG.rhel4

Thanks

Shane

________________________________

From: Tom Lane [mailto:tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us]
Sent: Fri 29/02/2008 22:55
To: Shane Wright
Cc: pgsql-general@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Upgrade to 8.3.0?

"Shane Wright" <shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com> writes:

I'm assuming that the default RPMs for RHEL 4 (on ftp.postgresql.org) are not built with --enable-cassert - and that I can veryify this by using the same reproduction case you demonstrated in the bug history?

I believe they aren't, but you could check by seeing what pg_config
reports as the configure options; or even more directly by seeing if
it will let you "SET debug_assertions TO on".

regards, tom lane

#6Joshua D. Drake
jd@commandprompt.com
In reply to: Shane Wright (#5)
Re: Upgrade to 8.3.0?

On Sat, 1 Mar 2008 03:27:50 -0000
"Shane Wright" <shane.wright@edigitalresearch.com> wrote:

The RPMs installed from are these:

postgresql-8.3.0-1PGDG.rhel4
postgresql-libs-8.3.0-1PGDG.rhel4
postgresql-server-8.3.0-1PGDG.rhel4

You need postgresql-debug (I think), Devrim?

Joshua D. Drake

Thanks

Shane

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#7Devrim GÜNDÜZ
devrim@gunduz.org
In reply to: Shane Wright (#3)
Re: Upgrade to 8.3.0?

Hi,

On Fri, 2008-02-29 at 21:31 +0000, Shane Wright wrote:

I'm assuming that the default RPMs for RHEL 4 (on ftp.postgresql.org)
are not built with --enable-cassert

Yeah, --enable-cassert is enabled only in beta packages.

Regards,
--
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