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
in a subtransaction stays open even if the subtransaction is aborted, so
any temporary files related to it must stay alive as well. With the patch,
we use ResourceOwners to track open temporary files and don't automatically
close them at subtransaction end (though in the normal case temporary files
are registered with the subtransaction resource owner and will therefore be
closed).
At end of top transaction, we still check that there's no temporary files
marked as close-at-end-of-transaction open, but that's now just a debugging
cross-check as the resource owner cleanup should've closed them already.
by hand. As an added bonus, the new code is smaller and more understandable,
and the ugly loops are gone.
This had been discussed all along but never implemented. It became clear that
it really needed to be fixed after a bug report by Pavan Deolasee.
corresponding struct definitions. This allows other headers to avoid including
certain highly-loaded headers such as rel.h and relscan.h, instead using just
relcache.h, heapam.h or genam.h, which are more lightweight and thus cause less
unnecessary dependencies.
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
module and teach PREPARE and protocol-level prepared statements to use it.
In service of this, rearrange utility-statement processing so that parse
analysis does not assume table schemas can't change before execution for
utility statements (necessary because we don't attempt to re-acquire locks
for utility statements when reusing a stored plan). This requires some
refactoring of the ProcessUtility API, but it ends up cleaner anyway,
for instance we can get rid of the QueryContext global.
Still to do: fix up SPI and related code to use the plan cache; I'm tempted to
try to make SQL functions use it too. Also, there are at least some aspects
of system state that we want to ensure remain the same during a replan as in
the original processing; search_path certainly ought to behave that way for
instance, and perhaps there are others.
by creating a reference-count mechanism, similar to what we did a long time
ago for catcache entries. The back branches have an ugly solution involving
lots of extra copies, but this way is more efficient. Reference counting is
only applied to tupdescs that are actually in caches --- there seems no need
to use it for tupdescs that are generated in the executor, since they'll go
away during plan shutdown by virtue of being in the per-query memory context.
Neil Conway and Tom Lane
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
ResourceOwner mechanism already released all reference counts for the
cache entries; therefore, we do not need to scan the catcache or relcache
at transaction end, unless we want to do it as a debugging crosscheck.
Do the crosscheck only in Assert mode. This is the same logic we had
previously installed in AtEOXact_Buffers to avoid overhead with large
numbers of shared buffers. I thought it'd be a good idea to do it here
too, in view of Kari Lavikka's recent report showing a real-world case
where AtEOXact_CatCache is taking a significant fraction of runtime.
when open references remain during normal cleanup of a resource owner.
This restores the system's ability to warn about leaks to what it was
before 8.0. Not really a user-level bug, but helpful for development.
the freelist, plus per-buffer spinlocks that protect access to individual
shared buffer headers. This requires abandoning a global freelist (since
the freelist is a global contention point), which shoots down ARC and 2Q
as well as plain LRU management. Adopt a clock sweep algorithm instead.
Preliminary results show substantial improvement in multi-backend situations.
Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...
pins at end of transaction, and reduce AtEOXact_Buffers to an Assert
cross-check that this was done correctly. When not USE_ASSERT_CHECKING,
AtEOXact_Buffers is a complete no-op. This gets rid of an O(NBuffers)
bottleneck during transaction commit/abort, which recent testing has shown
becomes significant above a few tens of thousands of shared buffers.
PROCLOCK structs in shared memory now have only a bitmask for held
locks, rather than counts (making them 40 bytes smaller, which is a
good thing). Multiple locks within a transaction are counted in the
local hash table instead, and we have provision for tracking which
ResourceOwner each count belongs to. Solves recently reported problem
with memory leakage within long transactions.
for every command executed within a transaction. For long transactions
this was a significant memory leak. Instead, we can delete a portal's
or subtransaction's ResourceOwner immediately, if we physically transfer
the information about its locks up to the parent owner. This does not
fully solve the leak problem; we need to do something about counting
multiple acquisitions of the same lock in order to fix it. But it's a
necessary step along the way.
possible to trap an error inside a function rather than letting it
propagate out to PostgresMain. You still have to use AbortCurrentTransaction
to clean up, but at least the error handling itself will cooperate.
keep track of portal-related resources separately from transaction-related
resources. This allows cursors to work in a somewhat sane fashion with
nested transactions. For now, cursor behavior is non-subtransactional,
that is a cursor's state does not roll back if you abort a subtransaction
that fetched from the cursor. We might want to change that later.
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Magnus Hagander
Alvaro Herrera
Peter Eisentraut
Tom Lane
Teodor Sigaev
Neil Conway
PostgreSQL Daemon