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
Logical decoding should not publish anything about tables created as
part of a heap rewrite during DDL. Those tables don't exist externally,
so consumers of logical decoding cannot do anything sensible with that
information. In ab28feae2b, we worked
around this for built-in logical replication, but that was hack.
This is a more proper fix: We mark such transient heaps using the new
field pg_class.relwrite, linking to the original relation OID. By
default, we ignore them in logical decoding before they get to the
output plugin. Optionally, a plugin can register their interest in
getting such changes, if they handle DDL specially, in which case the
new field will help them get information about the actual table.
Reviewed-by: Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com>
The regression tests for contrib/test_decoding regularly failed on
postgres instances that were very slow. Either because the hardware
itself was slow or because very expensive debugging options like
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS were used.
The reason they failed was just that some additional transactions were
decoded. Analyze and vacuum, triggered by autovac.
To fix just add a option to test_decoding to only display transactions
in which a change was actually displayed. That's not pretty because it
removes information from the tests; but better than constantly failing
tests in very likely harmless ways.
Backpatch to 9.4 where logical decoding was introduced.
Discussion: 20140629142511.GA26930@awork2.anarazel.de
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables. The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included. To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.
Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.
Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.