Jesper Engman <jes...@engman.net> writes: > I wonder if there is a small time span between when pg_dump starts and > when all locks have been acquired that may be the problem (if a table > is dropped during that time span). Is there such a small time of > vulnerability?
Certainly. pg_dump has to read pg_class to get the names of the tables, and then try to lock each one. If you drop a table during that window, the lock command will fail. The window is actually a bit longer than necessary in existing releases, because pg_dump was doing some other stuff before it got around to acquiring the locks. I fixed that recently http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git&a=commitdiff&h=68d977a73 but that patch hasn't made it to any released versions yet. In any case there's still a nonzero window. > Excluding tables from the dump is not an option - that will be an > incomplete backup. Um ... if you know it's a transient table, why do you care about backing it up? regards, tom lane -- Sent via pgsql-bugs mailing list (pgsql-bugs@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-bugs