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
While prior to this patch the user-visible effect on the database
of any set of successfully committed serializable transactions was
always consistent with some one-at-a-time order of execution of
those transactions, the presence of declarative constraints could
allow errors to occur which were not possible in any such ordering,
and developers had no good workarounds to prevent user-facing
errors where they were not necessary or desired. This patch adds
a check for serialization failure ahead of duplicate key checking
so that if a developer explicitly (redundantly) checks for the
pre-existing value they will get the desired serialization failure
where the problem is caused by a concurrent serializable
transaction; otherwise they will get a duplicate key error.
While it would be better if the reads performed by the constraints
could count as part of the work of the transaction for
serialization failure checking, and we will hopefully get there
some day, this patch allows a clean and reliable way for developers
to work around the issue. In many cases existing code will already
be doing the right thing for this to "just work".
Author: Thomas Munro, with minor editing of docs by me
Reviewed-by: Marko Tiikkaja, Kevin Grittner
Tom Lane
Kevin Grittner