On 12/10/2014 01:48 PM, Tomas Vondra wrote:
> On 10.12.2014 17:07, Gabriel Sánchez Martínez wrote:
>> Hi all,
>>
>> I am running PostgreSQL 9.3.5 on Ubuntu Server 14.04 64 bit with 64 GB
>> of RAM. When running pg_dump on a specific table, I get the following
>> error:
>>
>> pg_dump: Dumping the contents of table "x_20131111" failed:
>> PQgetResult() failed.
>> pg_dump: Error message from server: ERROR: invalid memory alloc request
>> size 18446744073709551613
>> pg_dump: The command was: COPY public.x_20131111 (...) TO stdout;
>> pg_dump: [parallel archiver] a worker process died unexpectedly
>>
>> If I run a COPY TO file from psql I get the same error.
>>
>> Is this an indication of corrupted data? What steps should I take?
> In my experience, issues like this are caused by a corrupted varlena
> header (i.e. corruption in text/varchar/... columns).
>
> How exactly that corruption happened is difficult to say - it might be a
> faulty hardware (RAM, controller, storage), it might be a bug (e.g.
> piece of memory gets overwritten by random data). Or it might be a
> consequence of incorrect hardware configuration (e.g. leaving the
> on-disk write cache enabled).
>
> If you have a backup of the data, use that instead of recovering the
> data from the current database - it's faster and safer.
>
> However, it might be worth spending some time analyzing the corruption
> to identify the cause, so that you can prevent it next time.
>
> The are tools that might help you with that - "pageinspect" extension is
> a way to look at the data files on a low-level. It may be quite tedious,
> though, and it may not work with badly broken data.
>
> Another option is "pg_check" - an extension I wrote a few years back. It
> analyzes the data file and prints info on all corruption occurences.
> It's available at https://github.com/tvondra/pg_check and I just pushed
> some minor fixes to make it 9.3-compatible.
Thanks. I'll restore from the earliest available backup, and I'll take
a look at pg_check.
>
> regards
> Tomas