On Fri, 2007-07-20 at 15:26 -0400, Andrew Sullivan wrote: > On Thu, Jul 19, 2007 at 03:13:27PM -0700, Ben wrote: > > What corner case reduces 2pc from "guaranteed" to "very high probability"? > > Is the worry if somebody leaves transactions in a prepared state for > > weeks, only to find that deadlock issues has arrisen at final commit time? > > That's not the worry, no. But something _else_ could happen. For > instance, recently it turned out that there was a way, using 2PC, to > lock everybody out of the database. The only remedy to that at the > moment is to blow away all the PREPAREd transactions, which could > mean you lose something that was already committed to. > To clarify, I think you're referring to this: http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2007-07/msg00245.php which can only be done as superuser locking a system table. I would classify that as a "catastrophic" problem, since it involves manually modifying $PGDATA. Regards, Jeff Davis
