postgres

Commit Graph

Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Bruce Momjian	ca3b37487b	Update copyright for 2021 Backpatch-through: 9.5	5 years ago
Robert Haas	34a947ca13	New contrib module, pg_surgery, with heap surgery functions. Sometimes it happens that the visibility information for a tuple becomes corrupted, either due to bugs in the database software or external factors. Provide a function heap_force_kill() that can be used to truncate such dead tuples to dead line pointers, and a function heap_force_freeze() that can be used to overwrite the visibility information in such a way that the tuple becomes all-visible. These functions are unsafe, in that you can easily use them to corrupt a database that was not previously corrupted, and you can use them to further corrupt an already-corrupted database or to destroy data. The documentation accordingly cautions against casual use. However, in some cases they permit recovery of data that would otherwise be very difficult to recover, or to allow a system to continue to function when it would otherwise be difficult to do so. Because we may want to add other functions for performing other kinds of surgery in the future, the new contrib module is called pg_surgery rather than something specific to these functions. I proposed back-patching this so that it could be more easily used by people running existing releases who are facing these kinds of problems, but that proposal did not attract enough support, so no back-patch for now. Ashutosh Sharma, reviewed and tested by Andrey M. Borodin, M. Beena Emerson, Masahiko Sawada, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, Asim Praveen, and Mark Dilger, and somewhat revised by me. Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZW1fsU-QUNCRUQMGUygBDPVeOTLCqRdQZch=EYZnctSA@mail.gmail.com	5 years ago

Author

SHA1

Message

Date

Bruce Momjian

ca3b37487b

Update copyright for 2021

Backpatch-through: 9.5

5 years ago

Robert Haas

34a947ca13

New contrib module, pg_surgery, with heap surgery functions.

Sometimes it happens that the visibility information for a tuple
becomes corrupted, either due to bugs in the database software or
external factors. Provide a function heap_force_kill() that can
be used to truncate such dead tuples to dead line pointers, and
a function heap_force_freeze() that can be used to overwrite the
visibility information in such a way that the tuple becomes
all-visible.

These functions are unsafe, in that you can easily use them to
corrupt a database that was not previously corrupted, and you can
use them to further corrupt an already-corrupted database or to
destroy data. The documentation accordingly cautions against
casual use. However, in some cases they permit recovery of data
that would otherwise be very difficult to recover, or to allow a
system to continue to function when it would otherwise be difficult
to do so.

Because we may want to add other functions for performing other
kinds of surgery in the future, the new contrib module is called
pg_surgery rather than something specific to these functions. I
proposed back-patching this so that it could be more easily used
by people running existing releases who are facing these kinds of
problems, but that proposal did not attract enough support, so
no back-patch for now.

Ashutosh Sharma, reviewed and tested by Andrey M. Borodin,
M. Beena Emerson, Masahiko Sawada, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi,
Asim Praveen, and Mark Dilger, and somewhat revised by me.

Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZW1fsU-QUNCRUQMGUygBDPVeOTLCqRdQZch=EYZnctSA@mail.gmail.com

5 years ago

2 Commits (5d8aa8bcedae7376bd97e79052d606db4e4f8dd4)