The principle behind the locking was not very well thought-out, and not
documented. Add a section in the README to explain how it's supposed to
work, and change the code so that it actually works that way.
This fixes two bugs:
1. If fast update was turned on concurrently, subsequent inserts to the
pending list would not conflict with predicate locks that were acquired
earlier, on entry pages. The included 'predicate-gin-fastupdate' test
demonstrates that. To fix, make all scans acquire a predicate lock on
the metapage. That lock represents a scan of the pending list, whether
or not there is a pending list at the moment. Forget about the
optimization to skip locking/checking for locks, when fastupdate=off.
2. If a scan finds no match, it still needs to lock the entry page. The
point of predicate locks is to lock the gabs between values, whether
or not there is a match. The included 'predicate-gin-nomatch' test
tests that case.
In addition to those two bug fixes, this removes some unnecessary locking,
following the principle laid out in the README. Because all items in
a posting tree have the same key value, a lock on the posting tree root is
enough to cover all the items. (With a very large posting tree, it would
possibly be better to lock the posting tree leaf pages instead, so that a
"skip scan" with a query like "A & B", you could avoid unnecessary conflict
if a new tuple is inserted with A but !B. But let's keep this simple.)
Also, some spelling fixes.
Author: Heikki Linnakangas with some editorization by me
Review: Andrey Borodin, Alexander Korotkov
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/0b3ad2c2-2692-62a9-3a04-5724f2af9114@iki.fi
Hash index searches acquire predicate locks on the primary
page of a bucket. It acquires a lock on both the old and new buckets
for scans that happen concurrently with page splits. During a bucket
split, a predicate lock is copied from the primary page of an old
bucket to the primary page of a new bucket.
Author: Shubham Barai, Amit Kapila
Reviewed by: Amit Kapila, Alexander Korotkov, Thomas Munro
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CALxAEPvNsM2GTiXdRgaaZ1Pjd1bs+sxfFsf7Ytr+iq+5JJoYXA@mail.gmail.com
Predicate locks are used on per page basis only if fastupdate = off, in
opposite case predicate lock on pending list will effectively lock whole index,
to reduce locking overhead, just lock a relation. Entry and posting trees are
essentially B-tree, so locks are acquired on leaf pages only.
Author: Shubham Barai with some editorization by me and Dmitry Ivanov
Review by: Alexander Korotkov, Dmitry Ivanov, Fedor Sigaev
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CALxAEPt5sWW+EwTaKUGFL5_XFcZ0MuGBcyJ70oqbWqr42YKR8Q@mail.gmail.com
Add page-level predicate locking, due to gist's code organization, patch seems
close to trivial: add check before page changing, add predicate lock before page
scanning. Although choosing right place to check is not simple: it should not
be called during index build, it should support insertion of new downlink and so
on.
Author: Shubham Barai with editorization by me and Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed by: Alexander Korotkov, Andrey Borodin, me
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CALxAEPtdcANpw5ePU3LvnTP8HCENFw6wygupQAyNBgD-sG3h0g@mail.gmail.com
SSI is based on, as well as the optimizations about relative commit times
and read-only transactions. Plus a bunch of other misc fixes and
improvements.
Dan Ports
For consistency, have all non-ASCII characters from contributors'
names in the source be in UTF-8. But remove some other more
gratuitous uses of non-ASCII characters.
On further analysis, it turns out that it is not needed to duplicate predicate
locks to the new row version at update, the lock on the version that the
transaction saw as visible is enough. However, there was a different bug in
the code that checks for dangerous structures when a new rw-conflict happens.
Fix that bug, and remove all the row-version chaining related code.
Kevin Grittner & Dan Ports, with some comment editorialization by me.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
Teodor Sigaev
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas