Bill Thoen <bthoen@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > I'm new to PostgreSQL and I ran into problem I don't want to repeat. I have > a database with a little more than 18 million records that takes up about > 3GB. I need to check to see if there are duplicate records, so I tried a > command like this: > > SELECT count(*) AS count, fld1, fld2, fld3, fld4 FROM MyTable > GROUP BY fld1, fld2, fld3, fld4 > ORDER BY 1 DESC; > > I knew this would take some time, but what I didn't expect was that about > an hour into the select, my mouse and keyboard locked up and also I > couldn't log in from another computer via SSH. This is a Linux machine > running Fedora Core 6 and PostgresQL is 8.1.4. There's about 50GB free on > the disc too. > > I finally had to shut the power off and reboot to regain control of my > computer (that wasn't good idea, either, but eventually I got everything > working again.) > > Is this normal behavior by PG with large databases? No. Something is wrong. > Did I misconfigure > something? Does anyone know what might be wrong? Possibly, but I would be more inclined to guess that your hardware is faulty and you encountered a RAM error, or the CPU overheated or something along those lines. I'm not familiar with Linux systems hard-locking like that unless there is a hardware issue. -- Bill Moran http://www.potentialtech.com ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq
