Previously, isolationtester displayed SQL query results using some
ad-hoc code that clearly hadn't had much effort expended on it.
Field values longer than 14 characters weren't separated from
the next field, and usually caused misalignment of the columns
too. Also there was no visual separation of a query's result
from subsequent isolationtester output. This made test result
files confusing and hard to read.
To improve matters, let's use libpq's PQprint() function. Although
that's long since unused by psql, it's still plenty good enough
for the purpose here.
Like 741d7f104, back-patch to all supported branches, so that this
isn't a stumbling block for back-patching isolation test changes.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/582362.1623798221@sss.pgh.pa.us
We've long contended with isolation test results that aren't entirely
stable. Some test scripts insert long delays to try to force stable
results, which is not terribly desirable; but other erratic failure
modes remain, causing unrepeatable buildfarm failures. I've spent a
fair amount of time trying to solve this by improving the server-side
support code, without much success: that way is fundamentally unable
to cope with diffs that stem from chance ordering of arrival of
messages from different server processes.
We can improve matters on the client side, however, by annotating
the test scripts themselves to show the desired reporting order
of events that might occur in different orders. This patch adds
three types of annotations to deal with (a) test steps that might or
might not complete their waits before the isolationtester can see them
waiting; (b) test steps in different sessions that can legitimately
complete in either order; and (c) NOTIFY messages that might arrive
before or after the completion of a step in another session. We might
need more annotation types later, but this seems to be enough to deal
with the instabilities we've seen in the buildfarm. It also lets us
get rid of all the long delays that were previously used, cutting more
than a minute off the runtime of the isolation tests.
Back-patch to all supported branches, because the buildfarm
instabilities affect all the branches, and because it seems desirable
to keep isolationtester's capabilities the same across all branches
to simplify possible future back-patching of tests.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/327948.1623725828@sss.pgh.pa.us
When key-share locking a tuple that has been not-key-updated, and the
update is a committed transaction, in some cases we raised
serializability errors:
ERROR: could not serialize access due to concurrent update
Because the key-share doesn't conflict with the update, the error is
unnecessary and inconsistent with the case that the update hasn't
committed yet. This causes problems for some usage patterns, even if it
can be claimed that it's sufficient to retry the aborted transaction:
given a steady stream of updating transactions and a long locking
transaction, the long transaction can be starved indefinitely despite
multiple retries.
To fix, we recognize that HeapTupleSatisfiesUpdate can return
HeapTupleUpdated when an updating transaction has committed, and that we
need to deal with that case exactly as if it were a non-committed
update: verify whether the two operations conflict, and if not, carry on
normally. If they do conflict, however, there is a difference: in the
HeapTupleBeingUpdated case we can just sleep until the concurrent
transaction is gone, while in the HeapTupleUpdated case this is not
possible and we must raise an error instead.
Per trouble report from Olivier Dony.
In addition to a couple of test cases that verify the changed behavior,
I added a test case to verify the behavior that remains unchanged,
namely that errors are raised when a update that modifies the key is
used. That must still generate serializability errors. One
pre-existing test case changes behavior; per discussion, the new
behavior is actually the desired one.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/560AA479.4080807@odoo.comhttps://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151014164844.3019.25750@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Backpatch to 9.3, where the problem appeared.
Tom Lane
Alvaro Herrera