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Sometimes it happens that the visibility information for a tuple becomes corrupted, either due to bugs in the database software or external factors. Provide a function heap_force_kill() that can be used to truncate such dead tuples to dead line pointers, and a function heap_force_freeze() that can be used to overwrite the visibility information in such a way that the tuple becomes all-visible. These functions are unsafe, in that you can easily use them to corrupt a database that was not previously corrupted, and you can use them to further corrupt an already-corrupted database or to destroy data. The documentation accordingly cautions against casual use. However, in some cases they permit recovery of data that would otherwise be very difficult to recover, or to allow a system to continue to function when it would otherwise be difficult to do so. Because we may want to add other functions for performing other kinds of surgery in the future, the new contrib module is called pg_surgery rather than something specific to these functions. I proposed back-patching this so that it could be more easily used by people running existing releases who are facing these kinds of problems, but that proposal did not attract enough support, so no back-patch for now. Ashutosh Sharma, reviewed and tested by Andrey M. Borodin, M. Beena Emerson, Masahiko Sawada, Rajkumar Raghuwanshi, Asim Praveen, and Mark Dilger, and somewhat revised by me. Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZW1fsU-QUNCRUQMGUygBDPVeOTLCqRdQZch=EYZnctSA@mail.gmail.com
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.