Schedule - FOSDEM PGDay 2023

LFMF: how a CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY led to a 6 hour downtime

Date: 2023-02-03
Time: 09:20–10:10
Room: Brussels Ballroom 2
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War story time!

My client - who prefers to remain unnamed - introduced a new table with an ON DELETE CASCADE foreign key. Which wasn't backed by an appropriate index. Creating that missing index (and a couple of bad decisions, some of them many years in the past) led to a downtime of about six (!) hours.

The talk * describes what happened * then explains what happened and * shows which decisions - by the client, the DBA (me), but also the PostgreSQL developers TBH - caused the catastrophic course of events

Obviously, we'll also discuss the lessons learned and which measures were taken to prevent a reoccurence.

This completely took me by surprise (and what an unpleasant one!), so:

Learn from my fail!

Slides

The following slides have been made available for this session:

Speaker

Gunnar "Nick" Bluth