For no obvious reason, isolationtester has always insisted that
session and step names be written with double quotes. This is
fairly tedious and does little for test readability, especially
since the names that people actually choose almost always look
like normal identifiers. Hence, let's tweak the lexer to allow
SQL-like identifiers not only double-quoted strings.
(They're SQL-like, not exactly SQL, because I didn't add any
case-folding logic. Also there's no provision for U&"..." names,
not that anyone's likely to care.)
There is one incompatibility introduced by this change: if you write
"foo""bar" with no space, that used to be taken as two identifiers,
but now it's just one identifier with an embedded quote mark.
I converted all the src/test/isolation/ specfiles to remove
unnecessary double quotes, but stopped there because my
eyes were glazing over already.
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/759113.1623861959@sss.pgh.pa.us
This is a necessary prerequisite for forthcoming changes to allow deadlock
scenarios to be tested by the isolation tester. It is also a good idea on
general principle, since these scenarios add no useful test coverage not
provided by other scenarios, but do to take time to execute.
This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE". These don't block each
other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
FOR UPDATE". UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.
Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
point of this patch.
The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
be stored alongside its Xid. Also, multixacts now need to persist
across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
only tuple locks, but also tuple updates. This means we need more
careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
can be removed. pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
servers.
Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
available from the tuple header. This is considered acceptable, because
the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.
Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
of the tuple there exist.)
With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
foreign key rules should be much reduced.
As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.
Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
overall behavior is sane. There's probably room for several more tests.
There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it. Original idea for the
patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
important start at the following message-ids:
AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
The previous value of 20ms is dangerously close to the time actually
spent just waiting for the deadlock to happen, so on occasion it causes
the test to fail simply because the other session didn't get to run
early enough, not managing to cause the deadlock that needs to be
detected. With this new value, it's expected that most machines on
normal load will be able to pass the test.
Author: Noah Misch
This enables us to test that blocking commands (such as foreign keys
checks that conflict with some other lock) act as intended. The set of
tests that this adds is pretty minimal, but can easily be extended by
adding new specs.
The intention is that this will serve as a basis for ensuring that
further tweaks of locking implementation preserve (or improve) existing
behavior.
Author: Noah Misch
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Alvaro Herrera