SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
versions of the row. In many cases, we work around this by requiring
DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
failures occur as a result. This commit doesn't change anything
related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
strength reductions in the future.
The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow. However, testing
of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
severe except under fairly extreme workloads. To mitigate those
problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
been processed. The catcache machinery already requires that
invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
than scanning the catalog at all. Thus, making snapshot reuse
dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
already subtly broken.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
This reduces unnecessary exposure of other headers through htup.h, which
is very widely included by many files.
I have chosen to move the function prototypes to the new file as well,
because that means htup.h no longer needs to include tupdesc.h. In
itself this doesn't have much effect in indirect inclusion of tupdesc.h
throughout the tree, because it's also required by execnodes.h; but it's
something to explore in the future, and it seemed best to do the htup.h
change now while I'm busy with it.
In the past, relhassubclass always remained true if a relation had ever had
child relations, even if the last subclass was long gone. While this had
only marginal performance implications in most cases, it was annoying, and
I'm now considering some planner changes that would raise the cost of a
false positive. It was previously impractical to fix this because of race
condition concerns. However, given the recent change that made tablecmds.c
take ShareExclusiveLock on relations that are gaining a child (commit
fbcf4b92aa), we can now allow ANALYZE to
clear the flag when it's no longer relevant. There is no additional
locking cost to do so, since ANALYZE takes ShareExclusiveLock anyway.
The purpose of this change is to eliminate the need for every caller
of SearchSysCache, SearchSysCacheCopy, SearchSysCacheExists,
GetSysCacheOid, and SearchSysCacheList to know the maximum number
of allowable keys for a syscache entry (currently 4). This will
make it far easier to increase the maximum number of keys in a
future release should we choose to do so, and it makes the code
shorter, too.
Design and review by Tom Lane.
When a column is renamed, we recursively rename the same column in
all descendent tables. But if one of those tables also inherits that
column from a table outside the inheritance hierarchy rooted at the
named table, we must throw an error. The previous coding correctly
prohibited the rename when the parent had inherited the column from
elsewhere, but overlooked the case where the parent was OK but a child
table also inherited the same column from a second, unrelated parent.
For now, not backpatched due to lack of complaints from the field.
KaiGai Kohei, with further changes by me.
Reviewed by Bernd Helme and Tom Lane.
find_inheritance_children(). This is a complete no-op in databases without
any inheritance. In databases where there are just a few entries in
pg_inherits, it could conceivably be a small loss. However, in databases with
many inheritance parents, it can be a big win.
ability to lock relations as they scan pg_inherits, and to ignore any
relations that have disappeared by the time we get lock on them. This
makes uses of these functions safe against concurrent DROP operations
on child tables: we will effectively ignore any just-dropped child,
rather than possibly throwing an error as in recent bug report from
Thomas Johansson (and similar past complaints). The behavior should
not change otherwise, since the code was acquiring those same locks
anyway, just a little bit later.
An exception is LockTableCommand(), which is still behaving unsafely;
but that seems to require some more discussion before we change it.
find_inheritance_children() and find_all_inheritors(). I got annoyed that
these are buried inside the planner but mostly used elsewhere. So, create
a new file catalog/pg_inherits.c and put them there, along with a couple
of other functions that search pg_inherits.
The code that modifies pg_inherits is (still) in tablecmds.c --- it's
kind of entangled with unrelated code that modifies pg_depend and other
stuff, so pulling it out seemed like a bigger change than I wanted to make
right now. But this file provides a natural home for it if anyone ever
gets around to that.
This commit just moves code around; it doesn't change anything, except
I succumbed to the temptation to make a couple of trivial optimizations
in typeInheritsFrom().
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Magnus Hagander