Windows crashed and some of the files on Redhat got corrupted, including some files in /var/lib/pgsql/data/pg_xlog/. When I tried to start postmaster, it fails with message "Invalid primary checkPoint record". I think it was trying to look for files named "0000000000000021" but only files named "0000000000000022" through "0000000000000027" were there. So I ran pg_resetxlog (this is purely experimental installation so I can destroy and recreate the database). After reset, pg_xlog/ ends up having only "0000000000000023".
Now, before the crash, I had created some tables like t, t2, and t3. The last activities I think were importing contrib/tablefunc.sql and creating +- 10k records to t3 from a Perl script in the form of some hundreds of transactions (all already committed). After the db is back up, I see (with \d in psql) only t.
When I want to recreate treeadj1, postgres complains with this message:
duplicate key violates unique constraint "pg_class_oid_index"
And I see in the pg_class table there are t2 and t3 entries.
Next I tried to do pg_dump because obviously the database is inconsistent. pg_dump fails with this message:
pg_dump: attempt to lock table "t3" failed: ERROR: relation "public.t3" does not exist
The question: what is the best/safest way to deal with this kind of situation:
1) mess with pg_class and possibly other system tables to fix the inconsistencies (How? I'm currently clueless at this :-)
2) do dump with -t to only dump existing tables (I tried this once, pg_restore fails with this message:
input file does not appear to be a valid archive (too short?)
I'm wild-guessing this is because the t table is empty. Dump file attached.)
3) restore from last backup (I'll lose more recent data).
-- dave
--
-- PostgreSQL database dump
--
SET SESSION AUTHORIZATION 'dave';
SET search_path = public, pg_catalog;
--
-- TOC entry 2 (OID 1466918)
-- Name: t; Type: TABLE; Schema: public; Owner: dave
--
CREATE TABLE t (
i integer
);
--
-- Data for TOC entry 3 (OID 1466918)
-- Name: t; Type: TABLE DATA; Schema: public; Owner: dave
--
COPY t2b (i) FROM stdin;
\.
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