Thanks very much for the advice, Kevin. I'll be raising a request with our sysadmins to upgrade to 8.3.10.
Sam
-----Original Message-----
From: Kevin Grittner [mailto:Kevin.Grittner@wicourts.gov]
Sent: Saturday, 17 April 2010 1:36 AM
To: Samuel Stearns
Cc: pgsql-admin@postgresql.org
Subject: Re: [ADMIN] FW: More than 1 pg_database Entry for Database - Thread #2
Samuel Stearns <SStearns@internode.com.au> wrote:
> I am running version 8.3.3 and encountered a problem
> Does anyone have any ideas how I can keep from getting into this
> duplicate database scenario? Any advice would be greatly
> appreciated.
> it was stated by Tom Lane that the large xmax number may indicate
> a problem with xid wraparound and that the problem row was never
> vacuumed away due to broken vacuuming procedures.
Applying the last 22 months of bug fixes would be a good start.
http://www.postgresql.org/support/versioning
http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.3/static/release.html
http://www.postgresql.org/download/
Autovacuum is supposed to protect you from wraparound, so it appears
to have fallen down somehow. There were fixes for autovacuum bugs
in 8.3.4 and 8.3.6, so it's entirely possible that just moving to
8.3.somethingrecent will prevent a recurrence.
-Kevin