Query Fails with "ERROR: tuple concurrently updated"

Products

• VMware Tanzu Greenplum

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

Running any query that updates the catalog ( say "grant" for example ) gives the following error:

ERROR:  tuple concurrently updated (heapam.c:3210)

 

Environment

Cause

As indicated by the error message, when you ran the query someone else was concurrently updating the same tuple, this can be easily reproduced with below steps.

• Open two terminals
• Run the below script on both of them:

  while true; do psql -c 'grant all on <tablename> to <rolename>'; done

 

Resolution

• Please try the query again after a few seconds.
• Wait for another time when the database is free to run the query.