Subject: Postgres problems...

From: Phil Shen <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 23 Nov 92 13:10:55 -0800

Hi,

Sorry to bother you, but I am having some problems with Postgres installed 
on a Sun machine.  We can't create or destroy databases, and all
queries to the backend seem to be locked up.  I just started to use
Postgres this quarter, so I don't know what's going on.  I know even less
about the "backend" of Postgres, so I don't know to what extent the
problem has gone.

The problem started when I was doing some retrieve commands using "joins",
and tried to create an index for a class called "kbterms" in my "db1"
database.  I believe that some of these commands either failed and didn't
return, or was taking too long, so I used <ctrl>-C to get out of monitor,
and ran monitor again.  (the kbterms class had over 6000 rows in it--the
data was brought into the db using "copy")  

Anyways, I noticed later using "ps -ax" that a Postgres process was still
running in the background, and creating a temp file that was growing by the
minute.  I decided to kill the process before it gobbled up the entire disk
space that the database was on, and when it was killed, it left a 28 Meg temp
file in the db1 subdirectory.  I didn't want to leave that temp file
there, so I deleted it using the Postgres userid.  (I thought that the
system would be able to recover from not being able to find a couple of
temp files)

A colleague ran ipcclean, but that didn't solve the problem.  I believe
that I ran "vacuum" on my "db1" database also.  If you have any ideas, please
let me know.
My e-mail address is [email-masked]

Thanks for your time,
Phil