Too allow table accesses to be not directly dependent on heap, several
new abstractions are needed. Specifically:
1) Heap scans need to be generalized into table scans. Do this by
introducing TableScanDesc, which will be the "base class" for
individual AMs. This contains the AM independent fields from
HeapScanDesc.
The previous heap_{beginscan,rescan,endscan} et al. have been
replaced with a table_ version.
There's no direct replacement for heap_getnext(), as that returned
a HeapTuple, which is undesirable for a other AMs. Instead there's
table_scan_getnextslot(). But note that heap_getnext() lives on,
it's still used widely to access catalog tables.
This is achieved by new scan_begin, scan_end, scan_rescan,
scan_getnextslot callbacks.
2) The portion of parallel scans that's shared between backends need
to be able to do so without the user doing per-AM work. To achieve
that new parallelscan_{estimate, initialize, reinitialize}
callbacks are introduced, which operate on a new
ParallelTableScanDesc, which again can be subclassed by AMs.
As it is likely that several AMs are going to be block oriented,
block oriented callbacks that can be shared between such AMs are
provided and used by heap. table_block_parallelscan_{estimate,
intiialize, reinitialize} as callbacks, and
table_block_parallelscan_{nextpage, init} for use in AMs. These
operate on a ParallelBlockTableScanDesc.
3) Index scans need to be able to access tables to return a tuple, and
there needs to be state across individual accesses to the heap to
store state like buffers. That's now handled by introducing a
sort-of-scan IndexFetchTable, which again is intended to be
subclassed by individual AMs (for heap IndexFetchHeap).
The relevant callbacks for an AM are index_fetch_{end, begin,
reset} to create the necessary state, and index_fetch_tuple to
retrieve an indexed tuple. Note that index_fetch_tuple
implementations need to be smarter than just blindly fetching the
tuples for AMs that have optimizations similar to heap's HOT - the
currently alive tuple in the update chain needs to be fetched if
appropriate.
Similar to table_scan_getnextslot(), it's undesirable to continue
to return HeapTuples. Thus index_fetch_heap (might want to rename
that later) now accepts a slot as an argument. Core code doesn't
have a lot of call sites performing index scans without going
through the systable_* API (in contrast to loads of heap_getnext
calls and working directly with HeapTuples).
Index scans now store the result of a search in
IndexScanDesc->xs_heaptid, rather than xs_ctup->t_self. As the
target is not generally a HeapTuple anymore that seems cleaner.
To be able to sensible adapt code to use the above, two further
callbacks have been introduced:
a) slot_callbacks returns a TupleTableSlotOps* suitable for creating
slots capable of holding a tuple of the AMs
type. table_slot_callbacks() and table_slot_create() are based
upon that, but have additional logic to deal with views, foreign
tables, etc.
While this change could have been done separately, nearly all the
call sites that needed to be adapted for the rest of this commit
also would have been needed to be adapted for
table_slot_callbacks(), making separation not worthwhile.
b) tuple_satisfies_snapshot checks whether the tuple in a slot is
currently visible according to a snapshot. That's required as a few
places now don't have a buffer + HeapTuple around, but a
slot (which in heap's case internally has that information).
Additionally a few infrastructure changes were needed:
I) SysScanDesc, as used by systable_{beginscan, getnext} et al. now
internally uses a slot to keep track of tuples. While
systable_getnext() still returns HeapTuples, and will so for the
foreseeable future, the index API (see 1) above) now only deals with
slots.
The remainder, and largest part, of this commit is then adjusting all
scans in postgres to use the new APIs.
Author: Andres Freund, Haribabu Kommi, Alvaro Herrera
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.dehttps://postgr.es/m/20160812231527.GA690404@alvherre.pgsql
This introduces the concept of table access methods, i.e. CREATE
ACCESS METHOD ... TYPE TABLE and
CREATE TABLE ... USING (storage-engine).
No table access functionality is delegated to table AMs as of this
commit, that'll be done in following commits.
Subsequent commits will incrementally abstract table access
functionality to be routed through table access methods. That change
is too large to be reviewed & committed at once, so it'll be done
incrementally.
Docs will be updated at the end, as adding them incrementally would
likely make them less coherent, and definitely is a lot more work,
without a lot of benefit.
Table access methods are specified similar to index access methods,
i.e. pg_am.amhandler returns, as INTERNAL, a pointer to a struct with
callbacks. In contrast to index AMs that struct needs to live as long
as a backend, typically that's achieved by just returning a pointer to
a constant struct.
Psql's \d+ now displays a table's access method. That can be disabled
with HIDE_TABLEAM=true, which is mainly useful so regression tests can
be run against different AMs. It's quite possible that this behaviour
still needs to be fine tuned.
For now it's not allowed to set a table AM for a partitioned table, as
we've not resolved how partitions would inherit that. Disallowing
allows us to introduce, if we decide that's the way forward, such a
behaviour without a compatibility break.
Catversion bumped, to add the heap table AM and references to it.
Author: Haribabu Kommi, Andres Freund, Alvaro Herrera, Dimitri Golgov and others
Discussion:
https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.dehttps://postgr.es/m/20160812231527.GA690404@alvherre.pgsqlhttps://postgr.es/m/20190107235616.6lur25ph22u5u5av@alap3.anarazel.dehttps://postgr.es/m/20190304234700.w5tmhducs5wxgzls@alap3.anarazel.de
access/heapam contains functions that are very storage specific (say
heap_insert() and a lot of lower level functions), and fairly generic
infrastructure like relation_open(), heap_open() etc. In the upcoming
pluggable storage work we're introducing a layer between table
accesses in general and heapam, to allow for different storage
methods. For a bit cleaner separation it thus seems advantageous to
move generic functions like the aforementioned to their own headers.
access/relation.h will contain relation_open() etc, and access/table.h
will contain table_open() (formerly known as heap_open()). I've decided
for table.h not to include relation.h, but we might change that at a
later stage.
relation.h already exists in another directory, but the other
plausible name (rel.h) also conflicts. It'd be nice if there were a
non-conflicting name, but nobody came up with a suggestion. It's
possible that the appropriate way to address the naming conflict would
be to rename nodes/relation.h, which isn't particularly well named.
To avoid breaking a lot of extensions that just use heap_open() etc,
table.h has macros mapping the old names to the new ones, and heapam.h
includes relation, table.h. That also allows to keep the
bulk renaming of existing callers in a separate commit.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190111000539.xbv7s6w7ilcvm7dp@alap3.anarazel.de
Andres Freund
Amit Kapila