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Meetup talk 2025-06-19 at 20:30

Database in Distress: Testing and Repairing Different Types of Database Corruption

Description

Every relation in PostgreSQL can be damaged, and sometimes the errors reported by the database are rather strange. In some cases, a session reading corrupted data can even crash the whole database. To better understand these issues and test different strategies for repairs, I created a Python application that simulates various types of damage. This talk demonstrates, through practical examples and outputs from the pageinspect extension, different types of data corruption — and proposes some future improvements that would help handle them more effectively.