"Error: relation x does not exist" logged by PostgreSQL server during installation

I posted a comment on #2001350: [meta] Drupal cannot be installed on PostgreSQL linking this issue.

Is there a specific error that is preventing you from installing Drupal, @jhmnieuwenhuis?

The "Error: relation x does not exist" error happens because of the way that Drupal 8 Storage layer was architected (for non-sql databases, but don't ask me why other than that). Cache and some other tables are not guaranteed to exist at run time, and are created as-needed. This means that cache operations fail transactions. The pgsql driver catches these with its mocked "implicit commit" behavior that I had to write.

Agreed - It is good that people are paying attention to logs, but we need to know if this actually caused a problem.

@mradcliffe Is there a CR, a doc page, or something we could point people to, or create one?

No, there is no change record or doc page. The relevant change is in #2181291: Prevent a query from aborting the entire transaction in pgsql back in 2014 (to mock implicit commits). Not sure about the storage layer docs.

I was looking for the equivalent of https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/system-requirements/database-server page on the Drupal 8 side, but couldn't find it. Good suggestion that it would be good to expand on this on a database server requirements doc page (or child page) for Drupal 8.

@ jhmnieuwenhuis, Thank you for reporting this problem. We rely on issue reports like this to improve Drupal core.

I tested this on 9.3.x and was able to install Drupal without errors in the logs. I used ddev with postgre, 13.4 (Debian 13.4-1.pgdg100+1).

Therefore, closing as cannot reproduce. If you are experiencing this problem reopen the issue, by setting the status to 'Active', and provide complete steps to reproduce the issue (starting from "Install Drupal core").

Thanks!

The PostgreSQL log does still output errors when installing Drupal or using the install page due to Drupal requiring to check cache (tables) during the installation process. This is currently expected behavior even though it's not the ideal behavior. This might be "Closed (duplicate)" or "Closed (works as designed)" :| rather than "Closed (cannot reproduce)" so I'm re-opening so this can be re-triaged.

I don't know what the default settings are in Debian, but when logging is visible, these do appear in PostgreSQL's log.

For instance, if we merely go to /core/install.php, then

Apache:

[Mon Sep 20 18:14:49.579625 2021] [proxy:debug] [pid 24:tid 139732560825120] proxy_util.c(2589): [client 172.19.0.5:45084] AH00947: connected /var/www/html/core/install.php to php:9000, referer: https://drupal.docker.internal/core/install.php

PostgreSQL:

2021-09-20 18:14:49.710 UTC [71] ERROR:  relation "config" does not exist at character 20                                                                            
2021-09-20 18:14:49.710 UTC [71] STATEMENT:  SELECT "data" FROM "config" WHERE "collection" = '' AND "name" = 'core.extension'                                       
2021-09-20 18:14:49.711 UTC [71] ERROR:  relation "config" does not exist at character 20                                                                            
2021-09-20 18:14:49.711 UTC [71] STATEMENT:  SELECT "data" FROM "config" WHERE "collection" = '' AND "name" = 'system.site'

When the install is actually in-progress, for each module being installed, there are many "relation does not exist" errors logged to postgresql's log.

I updated the issue summary to be more clear.