Re: Regarding Vacuumdb

Shaun Thomas wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 28 Aug 2001, Bhuvaneswari wrote:
> 
> > hi,
> > I am getting the following error while doing vacuumdb,
> >
> > ERROR: mdopen: couldn't open test1: No such file or directory
> > vacuumdb: database vacuum failed on db1.
> 
> We got this error a lot in 6.5.  Usually it means your table has somehow
> been corrupted, and postgres doesn't want anything to do with it.  It'll
> show up, and you can even select from it, but doing so will crash the
> back-end, and you can't run a vacuum or pg_dump on that database
> successfully.

Yes. This error was caused in older versions by doing something
like:

BEGIN;
DROP TABLE test1;
ABORT;

The 6.5 version of PostgreSQL would remove the underlying file from
the file system when DROP TABLE was executed, not when the
transaction performed a commit, so the file was gone, but the
entries in the system cataloge remained. This is fixed in newer
versions.

Hope that helps,

Mike Mascari
mascarm@mascari.com