Environment:

Product: Yugabyte SQL API

Affects versions prior to 2.6.5

Issue:

Table creation fails:

yuagbyte-# create table dual (dummy varchar(1)); 
ERROR RPC TIMEOUT

(in one example, it was eventually determined that NTP was not properly configured on these nodes and TServer stopped as clock skew was too large.)

Try to Drop  that Table "dual " But show the following error:

yugabyte=# drop table dual;
ERROR: table "dual" does not exist

Resolution:

The following Steps show take to solve this problem:

Run the Below Command on Node to check whether a table is present in the master Catalog even though it does not appear in the postgres table list.

./bin/yb-admin -master_addresses <master IP>  list_tables | grep "table name"

[yugabyte@ip-172-151-67-117 ~]$ ./yb-software/yugabyte-2.6.0.0-b69-centos-x86_64/bin/yb-admin -master_addresses 172.151.67.117 list_tables |grep "dummy"
yugabyte.dummy

Delete that Zombie table by running the following command:

./bin/yb-admin -master_addresses <master IP>  delete_table <table type> <table name>

[yugabyte@ip-172-151-67-117 ~]$ ./yb-software/yugabyte-2.6.0.0-b69-centos-x86_64/bin/yb-admin -master_addresses 172.151.67.117 delete_table ysql.yugabyte dummy
Deleted table yugabyte.dummy

Root Cause:

While creating a table, an RPC timeout occurs and it fails to create the tablets backing the table on a tserver, but the table is successfully created in catalog (whose tablets are maintained by the master servers). In this state, we get a zombie table where the catalog has record but it's not backed by tablets, so you aren't able to edit the table or create the same table name, but also unable to drop the table.

A possible root cause of this issue is tracked in https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db/issues/8251