By default VACUUM will skip pages that it can't immediately get
exclusive access to, which means that even activities as harmless
and unpredictable as checkpoint buffer writes might prevent a page
from being processed. Ordinarily this is no big deal, but we have
a small number of test cases that examine the results of VACUUM's
processing and therefore will fail if the page of interest is skipped.
This seems to be the explanation for some rare buildfarm failures.
To fix, add the DISABLE_PAGE_SKIPPING option to the VACUUM commands
in tests where this could be an issue.
In passing, remove a duplicated query in pageinspect/sql/page.sql.
Back-patch as necessary (some of these cases are as old as v10).
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/413923.1611006484@sss.pgh.pa.us
The contrib extensions pageinspect, pg_visibility and pgstattuple only
work against regular relations which have storage. They don't work
against foreign tables, partitioned (parent) tables, views, et al.
Add checks to the user-callable functions to return a useful error
message to the user if they mistakenly pass an invalid relation to a
function which doesn't accept that kind of relation.
In passing, improve some of the existing checks to use ereport() instead
of elog(), add a function to consolidate common checks where
appropriate, and add some regression tests.
Author: Amit Langote, with various changes by me
Reviewed by: Michael Paquier and Corey Huinker
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ab91fd9d-4751-ee77-c87b-4dd704c1e59c@lab.ntt.co.jp
