A user reported an interesting issue today. After restoring a dump created with --clean on a running application in his development environment his application started complaining of missing tables despite those tables very clearly existing.
After a little thinking, we determined that this was due to the now-default behaviour of Rails to create prepared statements for most queries. The prepared statements error out because the old relation they point to is missing, but this gives a misleading report thus:
PG::Error: ERROR: relation "xxx" does not exist
I'm not sure what the best outcome here would be. A very simple solution might be to expand the error message or add a hint to make it descriptive enough that a user might be able to figure out the cause on their own without happening to have the unusual intersection of Rails and Postgres internals knowlege I (unfortunately) possess. A better solution might be to attempt to re-prepare the statement before throwing an error.
-pvh
--
Peter van Hardenberg
San Francisco, California
"Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt." -- Kurt Vonnegut