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From: Geoff Winkless <[email protected]>
To: pgsql-generallists.postgresql.org <[email protected]>
Subject: UNLOGGED table CREATEd on one connection not immediately visible to another connection
Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2026 15:04:43 +0000
Message-ID: <CAEzk6ff5yHiJWDCoLcmqwC36O=VqLEHjbU2pcpYpOvdScM3t5g@mail.gmail.com> (raw)

Hi

In our application we have a situation where once a day one process
CREATEs an UNLOGGED table and INSERTs several hundred records using
individual queries (no explicit transactions) all of which return
successfully. We then send the ID of the table that we have created
over a TCP socket to a second process, which runs a query that JOINs
against that new table.

Unfortunately quite often the second process is getting a
PGRES_FATAL_ERROR with

Primary: relation "qreftmp750" does not exist

Now (and this is very important) this appears to be a race condition,
because when that process immediately retries the same query (which we
do when we get FATAL_ERROR) it sometimes works on the second or third
(or even 11th) attempt.

If we were somehow failing to create the table then the retries would
never work, and we absolutely don't send the qreftmp ID to the second
process until we've successfully INSERTed all of the records, so the
race isn't on the application side. There's no explicit transactions
in either process involved, they all just use implicit autocommit, so
I don't see that this can be a DDL versioning issue.

I'm loathe to point the finger at PG because I'm sure that if this
were a real issue it would have been flagged up well before now, but
I've been staring at our code for days and I'm stumped. Any
suggestions?

Thanks

Geoff

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