Corrupt database

Started by Neil Fraserover 23 years ago3 messagesgeneral
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#1Neil Fraser
neil@digitalroutes.co.uk

One of our PostgreSQL databases has been corrupted somehow. Whenever we
try to open it or access it the 'postmaster' task suddenly goes to 99%
CPU usage, it rapidly eats up all memory, then crashes our server.

This behaviour occurs when the database is opened in using Perl's DBI,
or when using psql or pg_dump or vacuumdb. There is about a megabyte of
text contained in this database which I'd rather like to extract
somehow. Our other PostgreSQL databases are running perfectly.

Any suggestions on how to recover my data? I've browsed the PG data
files, but they appear to be binary, which I can't read.

PostgreSQL 7.1.1 on Linux 2.2.19

Thank you.
--
| Neil D. Fraser, Programmer & Wizard, neil@digitalroutes.co.uk
| Digital Routes, Inverness, Scotland, www.digitalroutes.co.uk

#2Martijn van Oosterhout
kleptog@svana.org
In reply to: Neil Fraser (#1)
Re: Corrupt database

I've havn't done anything much with it in a while, but the link below may
help.

http://svana.org/kleptog/pgsql/pgfsck.html

On Wed, Oct 16, 2002 at 10:21:30AM +0100, Neil Fraser wrote:

One of our PostgreSQL databases has been corrupted somehow. Whenever we
try to open it or access it the 'postmaster' task suddenly goes to 99%
CPU usage, it rapidly eats up all memory, then crashes our server.

This behaviour occurs when the database is opened in using Perl's DBI,
or when using psql or pg_dump or vacuumdb. There is about a megabyte of
text contained in this database which I'd rather like to extract
somehow. Our other PostgreSQL databases are running perfectly.

Any suggestions on how to recover my data? I've browsed the PG data
files, but they appear to be binary, which I can't read.

PostgreSQL 7.1.1 on Linux 2.2.19

Thank you.
--
| Neil D. Fraser, Programmer & Wizard, neil@digitalroutes.co.uk
| Digital Routes, Inverness, Scotland, www.digitalroutes.co.uk

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--
Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> http://svana.org/kleptog/

Show quoted text

There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that can do binary
arithmetic and those that can't.

#3Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Neil Fraser (#1)
Re: Corrupt database

Neil Fraser <neil@digitalroutes.co.uk> writes:

One of our PostgreSQL databases has been corrupted somehow. Whenever we
try to open it or access it the 'postmaster' task suddenly goes to 99%
CPU usage, it rapidly eats up all memory, then crashes our server.

Hm. Can you attach to the backend task with a debugger and get a stack
trace to show where it's going nuts?

regards, tom lane