Re: [PATCH] Compressed TOAST data corruption with REPACK CONCURRENTLY

Antonin Houska <ah@cybertec.at>

From: Antonin Houska <ah@cybertec.at>
To: SATYANARAYANA NARLAPURAM <satyanarlapuram@gmail.com>
Cc: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, alvherre@kurilemu.de
Date: 2026-04-17T15:45:52Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Attachments

SATYANARAYANA NARLAPURAM <satyanarlapuram@gmail.com> wrote:

> restore_tuple() in repack.c uses SET_VARSIZE() to reconstruct the varlena header when 
> reading back external attributes from the spill file. In this process, looks like the flag 
> SET_VARSIZE_COMPRESSED is silently lost. Because of this, when REPACK CONCURRENTLY
> run  any concurrently updated column whose value was TOAST-compressed ends up with raw 
> compressed bytes behind an "uncompressed" header returning garbled data on subsequent reads.
> It appears that existing tests are using random chars which are uncompressable.
> 
> Please find the attached 0001-Fix-restore_tuple-losing-varlena-compression-flag.patch to fix this. 
> Additionally I updated the existing repack_toast test to include the scenario I was talking about.

Good catch, thanks!

I'd slightly prefer to fix it w/o checking the varlena type, as
attached. However, your test fails to reproduce the issue here, so I'm not
able to verify the fix. I'll take a closer look early next week.

-- 
Antonin Houska
Web: https://www.cybertec-postgresql.com

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. REPACK CONCURRENTLY: fix processing of toasted tuples