According to buildfarm member sungazer, the behavior of VACUUM can be
unstable in these tests even if we prevent autovacuum from running on
the tables in question, apparently because even a manual vacuum can
behave differently depending on whether anything else is running that
holds back the global xmin. So use a temporary table instead, which
as of commit a7212be8b9 enables
vacuuming using a more aggressive cutoff.
This approach can't be used for the regression test that involves a
materialized view, but that test doesn't run vacuum, so it shouldn't
be prone to this particular failure mode.
Analysis by Tom Lane. Patch by Ashutosh Sharma and me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/665524.1599948007@sss.pgh.pa.us
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
Robert Haas