RE: Re: PostgreSQL; Strange error

Hmm ... so you think the people who have complained of this are all
working with databases that have suffered previous crash corruption?
I doubt it. There's too much consistency to the reports: in
particular, it's generally triggered by creation of lots of large
objects, and it's always the indexes on pg_attribute,
never any other table (even though large object creation inserts into
several system tables). I don't see how the unfinished-split hypothesis
explains that.

I saw this error after PG' crashes and power off in my employer' project
where large objects were not used. As for pg_attributes - PG inserts
into this table more rows than into others => more splits => higher
probability of unfinished split in the event of crash.

My thought was that it is somehow related to the many-equal-keys issues
that we had in 7.0.* and before, and/or the poor behavior for purely

pg_attribute_relid_attnum_index is unique index, so I doubt that
"many-equal-keys issue" is related to subj.

sequential key insertion that we still have. But without a test case
it's hard to be sure.

This is hypothesis and we don't know how to test it. But unfinished splits
is not hypothesis. It's *obviously* may cause "my bits moved right off the
end of the world" error and we can test this very easy.

Vadim