Received: from sapphire.albourne.com (root@sapphire.albourne.com [195.212.241.227]) by hub.org (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id BAA70155 for ; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 01:45:07 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from a.joubert@albourne.com) Received: from isadora.cy.albourne.com (akamas.albourne.com [195.212.241.254]) by sapphire.albourne.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/Albourne/CYS/1.8/MAPS) with ESMTP id IAA15478; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 08:49:24 +0200 (EET) Received: from albourne.com (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by isadora.cy.albourne.com (8.9.3/8.9.3/Albourne/CYC/1.4) with ESMTP id IAA00362; Tue, 14 Dec 1999 08:45:03 +0200 (EET) Sender: a.joubert@albourne.com Message-ID: <3855E76F.9F183684@albourne.com> Date: Tue, 14 Dec 1999 08:45:03 +0200 From: Adriaan Joubert Organization: APL Financial Services (Overseas) Ltd X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (X11; I; OSF1 V4.0 alpha) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: Ed Loehr CC: pgsql-general@postgresql.org Subject: Re: [GENERAL] Is it safe to INSERT/DELETE during VACUUM? References: <14421.4341.805191.194488@ampato.aeccom.com> <38553CEA.8CFFD543@austin.rr.com> <38555166.32D789CA@austin.rr.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Ed Loehr wrote: > > Question: is it safe to insert/update/delete during VACUUM? > It is supposed to be (MVCC should take care of it), but in practice I've got bad experiences with it. The system should at least have a very low load. You can get dead-lock errors, as the tables being vacuumed are locked for a long time and then inaccessible to other queries (that's unavoidable, but still annoying). And a couple of times something went wrong and I ended up with duplicate tuples in my tables -- really duplicate, including the oid's. That required a table dump/sort/uniq/load to fix :-(. Adriaan