Sean Davis (sd...@mail.nih.gov)

We have a machine that serves as a fileserver and a database server.  Our
server hosts a raid array of 40 disk drives, attached to two3-ware cards,
one 9640SE-24 and one 9640SE-16. We have noticed that activity on one
controller blocks access on the second controller, not only for disk-IO but
also the command line tools which become unresponsive for the inactive
controller.   The controllers are sitting in adjacent PCI-express slots on a
machine with dual-dual AMD and 16GB of RAM.  Has anyone else noticed issues
like this?  Throughput for either controller is a pretty respectable
150-200MB/s writing and somewhat faster for reading, but the "blocking" is
problematic, as the machine is serving multiple purposes.

I know this is off-topic, but I know lots of folks here deal with very large
disk arrays; it is hard to get real-world input on machines such as these.


Thanks,
Sean

You should be able to install from CPAN, correct?

Sean

Thanks, Jorge.  I know that postgresql supports arrays, but I still
don't see how plpython supports arrays.  I noticed this post:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-general/2007-01/msg01417.php

from January, 2007 that suggests how to use the string representation
of an array to convert to/from python arrays.  This will work, but I
was wondering if there is now a true conversion from postgresql arrays
to python and vice-versa.

Thanks,
Sean

Just a simple question--does plpythonu (8.3beta) have support for
arrays?  I don't see a specific mention of it in the docs, so I
suppose not.

Thanks,
Sean

What is the expected behavior of a construct like this:

def insert_xml(elem):
    id=int(elem.findtext('PMID'))
    try:
        plpy.execute(plan,[unicode(ET.tostring(elem)),id])
    except:
        plpy.execute(plan2,[unicode(ET.tostring(elem)),id])

id is a primary key on the table into which I am inserting.  "plan" is
the execute plan for inserting new data.  "plan2" is for updating data
already in the database.  When I run this, I am not able to catch
errors of this type:

WARNING:  plpython: in function insert_medline_file:
DETAIL:  plpy.Error: Unknown error in PLy_spi_execute_plan
ERROR:  duplicate key value violates unique constraint "medlinexml_pkey"
CONTEXT:  SQL statement "insert into medlinexml(content,id) values
(xmlparse(CONTENT $1),$2)"

Why am I not able to catch this error and execute the update plan?
The manual (8.3beta2) implies that errors generated in functions are
genuine python errors that I should be able to catch.

Thanks,
Sean