On Sun, Jun 28, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> I'm not sure what you consider "dire", but missing a dirty buffer
> belonging to the to-be-destroyed table would result in the system being
> permanently unable to checkpoint, because attempts to write out the buffer
> to the no-longer-extant file would fail. You could only get out of the
> situation via a forced database crash (immediate shutdown), followed by
> replaying all the WAL since the time of the problem. In production
> contexts that could be pretty dire.
Hmm, that is kind of ugly. Is the write actually going to fail,
though, or is it just going to create a sparse file?
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company