> Hmm ... so you think the people who have complained of this are all
> working with databases that have suffered previous crash corruption?
> I doubt it.  There's too much consistency to the reports: in
> particular, it's generally triggered by creation of lots of large
> objects, and it's always the indexes on pg_attribute,
> never any other table (even though large object creation inserts into
> several system tables). I don't see how the unfinished-split hypothesis
> explains that.

I saw this error after PG' crashes and power off in my employer' project
where large objects were not used. As for pg_attributes - PG inserts
into this table more rows than into others => more splits => higher
probability of unfinished split in the event of crash.

> My thought was that it is somehow related to the many-equal-keys issues
> that we had in 7.0.* and before, and/or the poor behavior for purely

pg_attribute_relid_attnum_index is unique index, so I doubt that
"many-equal-keys issue" is related to subj.

> sequential key insertion that we still have.  But without a test case
> it's hard to be sure.

This is hypothesis and we don't know how to test it. But unfinished splits
is not hypothesis. It's *obviously* may cause "my bits moved right off the
end of the world" error and we can test this very easy.

Vadim

Tue, 20 Mar 2001 10:59:16 -0800
"Mikheev, Vadim" <vmikheev@SECTORBASE.COM>
RE: Re: PostgreSQL; Strange error 