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
In 247c76a989, I added some code to do fine-grained checking of
MultiXact status of locking/updating transactions when traversing an
update chain. There was a thinko in that patch which would have the
traversing abort, that is return HeapTupleUpdated, when the other
transaction is a committed lock-only. In this case we should ignore it
and return success instead. Of course, in the case where there is a
committed update, HeapTupleUpdated is the correct return value.
A user-visible symptom of this bug is that in REPEATABLE READ and
SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation modes spurious serializability errors
can occur:
ERROR: could not serialize access due to concurrent update
In order for this to happen, there needs to be a tuple that's key-share-
locked and also updated, and the update must abort; a subsequent
transaction trying to acquire a new lock on that tuple would abort with
the above error. The reason is that the initial FOR KEY SHARE is seen
as committed by the new locking transaction, which triggers this bug.
(If the UPDATE commits, then the serialization error is correctly
reported.)
When running a query in READ COMMITTED mode, what happens is that the
locking is aborted by the HeapTupleUpdated return value, then
EvalPlanQual fetches the newest version of the tuple, which is then the
only version that gets locked. (The second time the tuple is checked
there is no misbehavior on the committed lock-only, because it's not
checked by the code that traverses update chains; so no bug.) Only the
newest version of the tuple is locked, not older ones, but this is
harmless.
The isolation test added by this commit illustrates the desired
behavior, including the proper serialization errors that get thrown.
Backpatch to 9.3.
Tom Lane
Alvaro Herrera