Tales From A Lazy Fat DBA

Today would like to discuss about the issue that we faced while doing a BART restore operation of one of the EDB 11 PostgreSQL instance. This was a new system under realization phase (before delivery to customer). So, during one of the test we saw the restore got failed with a message which says something about the value ‘tablespace_path’. I know I have a tablespace in this system, but I initially though that BART will take care of it by its own, but its was not the case.

Below was the error what I have encountered during the test.

[enterprisedb@fatdba archived_wals]$ bart -c /usr/edb-bart-1.1/etc/bart.cfg RESTORE -s edbserver -i 1602187005158 -p /edb/as10/as10/data/
INFO:  restoring backup '1602187005158' of server 'edbserver'
ERROR: "tablespace_path" is not set
[enterprisedb@fatdba archived_wals]$
 

Okay, let’s first check tablespace details, we use the metacommand of ‘db’ to get that info about tablespaces. Okay, so we have it’s location, size details.
Let’s go inside the said directoy and see what all is there.
Note: Last two are the default tablespaces so need to worry about them.

enterprisedb=# \db+
                                              List of tablespaces
    Name    |    Owner     |           Location           | Access privileges | Options |  Size   | Description
------------+--------------+------------------------------+-------------------+---------+---------+-------------
 newtblspc  | dixit        | /home/enterprisedb/newtblspc |                   |         | 52 kB   |
 pg_default | enterprisedb |                              |                   |         | 1362 MB |
 pg_global  | enterprisedb |                              |                   |         | 774 kB  |
(3 rows)

[enterprisedb@fatdba pg_tblspc]$ pwd
/edb/as10/as10/data_test/pg_tblspc
[enterprisedb@fatdba pg_tblspc]$ ls -ltrh
total 4.0K
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 enterprisedb enterprisedb   28 May  5 17:58 42250 -> /home/enterprisedb/newtblspc
drwx------. 3 enterprisedb enterprisedb 4.0K Oct  8 21:56 PG_10_201707211
 

Okay, so we have a soft-link created for the tablespace under PG_TBLSPC directory under DATA dir with OID 42250.
Now when we have all the information, time to add requisite parameter in bart.cfg file to consider tablespaces, just like below.
Format: OID_1=tablespace_path_1;OID_2=tablespace_path_2 …
example: tablespace_path = 42250=/edb/as10/as10/data_test/pg_tblspc
Note: tablespace_path parameter must exist or to be empty at the time you perform the BART RESTORE operation.

Now let’s modify our bart confguration file, will look something like below with the ‘tablespace_path’ option set.

[EDBSERVER]
host = 10.0.0.144
port = 5444
user = enterprisedb
backup_name = mktg_%year-%month-%dayT%hour:%minute
cluster_owner = enterprisedb
description = "EDB PROD server"
archive_command='scp %p enterprisedb@10.0.0.144:/edbbackup/edbserver/archived_wals/%f'
tablespace_path = 42250=/edb/as10/as10/data_test/pg_tblspc
allow_incremental_backups=enabled
 

All set for the restore now, let’s try that.

[enterprisedb@fatdba pg_tblspc]$ bart -c /usr/edb-bart-1.1/etc/bart.cfg RESTORE -s edbserver -i 1602187005158 -p /edb/as10/as10/data/
INFO:  restoring backup '1602187005158' of server 'edbserver'
WARNING: tablespace restore path is not empty (/edb/as10/as10/data_test/pg_tblspc), restoring anyway
INFO:  base backup restored
INFO:  writing recovery.conf file
INFO:  WAL file(s) will be streamed from the BART host
INFO:  archiving is disabled
INFO:  permissions set on $PGDATA
INFO:  restore completed successfully
[enterprisedb@fatdba pg_tblspc]$
[enterprisedb@fatdba pg_tblspc]$
 

This is fixed.

Hope That Helped!
Prashant Dixit