* Robert Haas (robertmh...@gmail.com) wrote: > On Mon, Jun 6, 2016 at 11:44 AM, Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> wrote: > >> In terms of diagnostic tools, you can get the VM bits and > >> page-level bits using the pg_visibility extension; I wrote it > >> precisely because of concerns like the ones you raise here. If you > >> want to cross-check the page-level bits against the tuple-level bits, > >> you can do that with the pageinspect extension. And if you do those > >> things, you can actually find out whether stuff is broken. > > > > That's WAY out ouf reach of any "normal users". Adding a vacuum option > > is doable, writing complex queries is not. > > Why would they have to write the complex query? Wouldn't they just > need to run that we wrote for them? > > I mean, I'm not 100% dead set against this option you want, but in all > honestly, I would never, ever tell anyone to use it. Unleashing > VACUUM on possibly-damaged data is just asking it to decide to prune > away tuples you don't want gone. I would try very hard to come up > with something to give that user that was only going to *read* the > possibly-damaged data with as little chance of modifying or erasing it > as possible.
I certainly agree with this. We need a read-only utility which checks that the system is in a correct and valid state. There are a few of those which have been built for different pieces, I believe, and we really should have one for the visibility map, but I don't think it makes sense to imply in any way that VACUUM can or should be used for that. Thanks! Stephen
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