Subject: problem with postgres v4r2

From: [email-masked] (Sunay Tripathi)
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 95 17:48:11 GMT+5:30

Friends,

I am in really deep shit. I have developed a major application on postgres.
For testing, I was using about 1000 records and every thing was fine. Once
I loaded the database, weird things started happening. Let me give you a
background -

1) I have installed postgres v4r2 on a Sun Sparc 10 running Solaris 2.3.
It has 64MB RAM and 150Mb Swap space. THe database has about 5 tables
having 3 to 7 attributes. Each table has about 20,000 records.

2) The backend sometime crashes and sometimes gives wierd responses to my
queries (specially if they have a join). I suspect that the query optimiser
of postgresv4r2 is the real culprit. Because with exactly the same database
structure and same records, all the queries work on Postgres v4r1 under
SunOS 4.1.1.

So, is there any way to turn off the query optimiser (either at compile time
or at run time)?

Is anyone else facing similar problem with postgres 4.2 under Solaris 2.3?

Also, is postgres v4r1 available for Solaris 2.3?

I am really desparate and will appreciate any help that I can get.

Sunay

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From: [email-masked] (Paul M. Aoki)
Date: Mon, 13 Feb 95 10:10:47 -0800

i don't know what's up with your mailers, but i've answered this at
least twice now (though the address before was Rekha Goel
<[email-masked]>)..

[email-masked] (Sunay Tripathi) writes:
> 2) The backend sometime crashes and sometimes gives wierd responses
> to my queries (specially if they have a join). I suspect that the
> query optimiser of postgresv4r2 is the real culprit.

can you elaborate on why you think the optimizer is the problem?
the optimizer runs to completion before any tuples are returned, so if
you get weird responses, it cannot be crashing in the optimizer.

> So, is there any way to turn off the query optimiser (either at
> compile time or at run time)?

no.  you can turn off `expensive function optimization' using 
	postmaster -o '-x off'

> Because with exactly the same database structure and same records,
> all the queries work on Postgres v4r1 under SunOS 4.1.1.

seems more likely that it's just instability on solaris.  there are
all sorts of differences between sunos 4 and sunos 5 that cause
different bugs to arise.  (changes to the way `malloc' works come to
mind.)

> Also, is postgres v4r1 available for Solaris 2.3?

not officially but there is some stuff under
  ftp://s2k-ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/postgres/oldpost/postgres-v4r1/solaris2
that might or might not work.  you will need the modified gcc 2.5.8
that comes with the 4.2/solaris distribution or gcc 2.6.1 or later.
--
  Paul M. Aoki          |  University of California at Berkeley
  [email-masked]  |  Dept. of EECS, Computer Science Division (#1776) 
                        |  Berkeley, CA 94720-1776