Avoiding, Detecting, and Recovering From Data Corruption - Robert Haas: PGCon 2020
Channel: PGCon
Date: 2020-12-12

From https://www.pgcon.org/events/pgcon_2020/schedule/session/101-avoiding-detecting-and-recovering-from-data-corruption/

PostgreSQL databases can become corrupted for a variety of reasons, including hardware failure, software failure, and user error. In this talk, I’ll talk about some of my experiences with database corruption. In particular, I’ll mention some of the things which seem to be common causes of database corruption, such as procedural errors taking or restoring backups; some of the ways that database corruption most often manifests when it does occur, such as errors indicating inconsistencies between a table and its indexes or a table and its toast table; and a little bit about techniques that I have seen used to repair databases or recover from corruption, including some experiences with pg_resetxlog. This talk will be based mostly on my experiences working with EnterpriseDB customers; I hope that it will be useful to hackers from the point of view of thinking about possible improvements to PostgreSQL, and to end users from the point of view of helping them avoid, diagnose, and cope with corruption.