Hi all...

I've a big thorne in my side at the moment.

I'developing a web app based essentially on a set of report. This 
reports are generated from queryes on my client's legacy system. 
For obviuos security reason, my app doesn't interacts directly with 
the main server, but is built around a Postgres DB on a separate 
machine (that is also the web server), and I set up a "poor man's 
replication" that batch transfer data from legacy server to pgsql 
server.

In practice, the legacy server generates ASCII dumps of the data 
necessary for the reports and the zips'em and ftp'em to the web 
server. Then, a little process sheduled in cron get them up and 
COPY them in the pgsql system. I built this process using C and 
LibPQ (if necessary, I can post the code, but is a very simple thing 
and I assume you can figure up how it works).

I used this schema many times for various web app, and I never 
encountered problems (I've got an app built eons ago, based on 
Slack 3.5 and PG 6.3.2, that's housed on a far-away provider and 
that never stopped a single second in all of this time. Wow!).

Now I was trying it on a brand new RH 6.2 with PG 7.0.2, RPM 
version. The problem is that the COPY of the data, apparently, 
sometimes leaves a table in an inconsistent state.
The command doesn't throw any error, but when I try to SELECT or 
VACUUM that table the backend dumps core.  Apparently the only 
thing I can do is drop the table and recreate it. This is 
EXTREMELY unfortunate, since it all must be automated and if I 
can't catch any error condition during the update, than also the web 
app start crashing down... 

Sadly this happens in a very inconsistent way. However, it seems 
that the size of the data file is related to the frequency of the 
problem: and since some of the table dumps are more then 20 
Meg, this is no good news. 

I have not got any log, cause the RPM versions doesn't create 
them, however, I'll try to fix this as soon as possible.

In the meantime, anybody can share some hint on how to resolve 
this nightmare?


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Fabrizio Ermini               Alternate E-mail:
C.so Umberto, 7               [EMAIL PROTECTED]
loc. Meleto Valdarno          Mail on GSM: (keep it short!)
52020 Cavriglia (AR)          [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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