Re: [GENERAL] Error that shouldn't happen?

On Thu, May 18, 2017 at 1:18 PM, Rob Brucks <rob.brucks@rackspace.com> wrote:

According to this post, adding "if not exists" won't really help for race conditions.

 

"The bottom line is that CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS doesn't pretend to

handle concurrency issues any better than regular old CREATE TABLE,

which is to say not very well." - Robert Haas

 

https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CA+TgmoZAdYVtwBfp1FL2sMZbiHCWT4UPrzRLNnX1Nb30Ku3-gg@mail.gmail.com

 

It still doesn't explain how the function got past creating the table, but failed on the index.  If another thread was also creating the table then there should have been lock contention on the create table statement.

A​T1: Insert, failed, cannot find table

AT2: Insert, failed, cannot find table

BT2: Create Table, succeeds

BT1: Create Table; fails, it exists now, if exists converts to a warning

CT2: Create Index, succeeds

CT1: Create Index, fails , hard error

DT2: Insert, succeeds

​DT1: Never Happens

What that post seems to be describing is that it is possible the "BT1" actually hard errors instead of just being converted into a notice.  There is no statement visible action to show that interleave but there is an underlying race condition since both BT1 and BT2 are executing concurrently.

In short even with IF NOT EXISTS you are not guaranteed to not fail.  But at least IF NOT EXISTS makes the probability of not failing > 0.  It doesn't handle the concurrency any better - but it does change the outcome in some of those less-than-ideally handled situations.

David J.