Make nbtree treat all index tuples as having a heap TID attribute.
Index searches can distinguish duplicates by heap TID, since heap TID is
always guaranteed to be unique. This general approach has numerous
benefits for performance, and is prerequisite to teaching VACUUM to
perform "retail index tuple deletion".
Naively adding a new attribute to every pivot tuple has unacceptable
overhead (it bloats internal pages), so suffix truncation of pivot
tuples is added. This will usually truncate away the "extra" heap TID
attribute from pivot tuples during a leaf page split, and may also
truncate away additional user attributes. This can increase fan-out,
especially in a multi-column index. Truncation can only occur at the
attribute granularity, which isn't particularly effective, but works
well enough for now. A future patch may add support for truncating
"within" text attributes by generating truncated key values using new
opclass infrastructure.
Only new indexes (BTREE_VERSION 4 indexes) will have insertions that
treat heap TID as a tiebreaker attribute, or will have pivot tuples
undergo suffix truncation during a leaf page split (on-disk
compatibility with versions 2 and 3 is preserved). Upgrades to version
4 cannot be performed on-the-fly, unlike upgrades from version 2 to
version 3. contrib/amcheck continues to work with version 2 and 3
indexes, while also enforcing stricter invariants when verifying version
4 indexes. These stricter invariants are the same invariants described
by "3.1.12 Sequencing" from the Lehman and Yao paper.
A later patch will enhance the logic used by nbtree to pick a split
point. This patch is likely to negatively impact performance without
smarter choices around the precise point to split leaf pages at. Making
these two mostly-distinct sets of enhancements into distinct commits
seems like it might clarify their design, even though neither commit is
particularly useful on its own.
The maximum allowed size of new tuples is reduced by an amount equal to
the space required to store an extra MAXALIGN()'d TID in a new high key
during leaf page splits. The user-facing definition of the "1/3 of a
page" restriction is already imprecise, and so does not need to be
revised. However, there should be a compatibility note in the v12
release notes.
Author: Peter Geoghegan
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Alexander Korotkov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzkVb0Kom=R+88fDFb=JSxZMFvbHVC6Mn9LJ2n=X=kS-Uw@mail.gmail.com
Use dedicated struct to represent nbtree insertion scan keys. Having a
dedicated struct makes the difference between search type scankeys and
insertion scankeys a lot clearer, and simplifies the signature of
several related functions. This is based on a suggestion by Andrey
Lepikhov.
Streamline how unique index insertions cache binary search progress.
Cache the state of in-progress binary searches within _bt_check_unique()
for later instead of having callers avoid repeating the binary search in
an ad-hoc manner. This makes it easy to add a new optimization:
_bt_check_unique() now falls out of its loop immediately in the common
case where it's already clear that there couldn't possibly be a
duplicate.
The new _bt_check_unique() scheme makes it a lot easier to manage cached
binary search effort afterwards, from within _bt_findinsertloc(). This
is needed for the upcoming patch to make nbtree tuples unique by
treating heap TID as a final tiebreaker column. Unique key binary
searches need to restore lower and upper bounds. They cannot simply
continue to use the >= lower bound as the offset to insert at, because
the heap TID tiebreaker column must be used in comparisons for the
restored binary search (unlike the original _bt_check_unique() binary
search, where scankey's heap TID column must be omitted).
Author: Peter Geoghegan, Heikki Linnakangas
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Andrey Lepikhov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-WzmE6AhUdk9NdWBf4K3HjWXZBX3+umC7mH7+WDrKcRtsOw@mail.gmail.com
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
Most of these had been obsoleted by 568d4138c / the SnapshotNow
removal.
This is is preparation for moving most of tqual.[ch] into either
snapmgr.h or heapam.h, which in turn is in preparation for pluggable
table AMs.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180703070645.wchpu5muyto5n647@alap3.anarazel.de
Historically we forbade datatype-specific comparison functions from
returning INT_MIN, so that it would be safe to invert the sort order
just by negating the comparison result. However, this was never
really safe for comparison functions that directly return the result
of memcmp(), strcmp(), etc, as POSIX doesn't place any such restriction
on those library functions. Buildfarm results show that at least on
recent Linux on s390x, memcmp() actually does return INT_MIN sometimes,
causing sort failures.
The agreed-on answer is to remove this restriction and fix relevant
call sites to not make such an assumption; code such as "res = -res"
should be replaced by "INVERT_COMPARE_RESULT(res)". The same is needed
in a few places that just directly negated the result of memcmp or
strcmp.
To help find places having this problem, I've also added a compile option
to nbtcompare.c that causes some of the commonly used comparators to
return INT_MIN/INT_MAX instead of their usual -1/+1. It'd likely be
a good idea to have at least one buildfarm member running with
"-DSTRESS_SORT_INT_MIN". That's far from a complete test of course,
but it should help to prevent fresh introductions of such bugs.
This is a longstanding portability hazard, so back-patch to all supported
branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180928185215.ffoq2xrq5d3pafna@alap3.anarazel.de
In our B-tree implementation appropriate leaf page for new tuple
insertion is acquired using _bt_search() function. This function always
returns leaf page locked in shared mode. In order to obtain exclusive
lock, caller have to relock the page.
This commit makes _bt_search() function lock leaf page immediately in
exclusive mode when needed. That removes unnecessary relock and, in
turn reduces lock contention for B-tree leaf pages. Our experiments
on multi-core systems showed acceleration up to 4.5 times in corner
case.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfduAMDFMNYTCN7VMBsFg_hsf0GqiqXnt%2BbSeaJworwFoig%40mail.gmail.com
Author: Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed-by: Yoshikazu Imai, Simon Riggs, Peter Geoghegan
During parallel index scans, if the current page to be read is deleted, we
skip it and try to get the next page for a scan without releasing the buffer
lock on the current page. To get the next page, sometimes it needs to wait
for another process to complete its scan and advance it to the next page.
Now, it is quite possible that the master backend has errored out before
advancing the scan and issued a termination signal for all workers. The
workers failed to notice the termination request during wait because the
interrupts are held due to buffer lock on the previous page. This lead to
all workers being stuck.
The fix is to release the buffer lock on current page before trying to get
the next page. We are already doing same in backward scans, but missed
it for forward scans.
Reported-by: Victor Yegorov
Bug: 15290
Diagnosed-by: Thomas Munro and Amit Kapila
Author: Amit Kapila
Reviewed-by: Thomas Munro
Tested-By: Thomas Munro and Victor Yegorov
Backpatch-through: 10 where parallel index scans were introduced
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/153228422922.1395.1746424054206154747@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Add several assertions that ensure that we're dealing with a pivot tuple
without non-key attributes where that's expected. Also, remove the
assertion within _bt_isequal(), restoring the v10 function signature. A
similar check will be performed for the page highkey within
_bt_moveright() in most cases. Also avoid dropping all objects within
regression tests, to increase pg_dump test coverage for INCLUDE indexes.
Rather than using infrastructure that's generally intended to be used
with reference counted heap tuple descriptors during truncation, use the
same function that was introduced to store flat TupleDescs in shared
memory (we use a temp palloc'd buffer). This isn't strictly necessary,
but seems more future-proof than the old approach. It also lets us
avoid including rel.h within indextuple.c, which was arguably a
modularity violation. Also, we now call index_deform_tuple() with the
truncated TupleDesc, not the source TupleDesc, since that's more robust,
and saves a few cycles.
In passing, fix a memory leak by pfree'ing truncated pivot tuple memory
during CREATE INDEX. Also pfree during a page split, just to be
consistent.
Refactor _bt_check_natts() to be more readable.
Author: Peter Geoghegan with some editorization by me
Reviewed by: Alexander Korotkov, Teodor Sigaev
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAH2-Wz%3DkCWuXeMrBCopC-tFs3FbiVxQNjjgNKdG2sHxZ5k2y3w%40mail.gmail.com
This patch introduces INCLUDE clause to index definition. This clause
specifies a list of columns which will be included as a non-key part in
the index. The INCLUDE columns exist solely to allow more queries to
benefit from index-only scans. Also, such columns don't need to have
appropriate operator classes. Expressions are not supported as INCLUDE
columns since they cannot be used in index-only scans.
Index access methods supporting INCLUDE are indicated by amcaninclude flag
in IndexAmRoutine. For now, only B-tree indexes support INCLUDE clause.
In B-tree indexes INCLUDE columns are truncated from pivot index tuples
(tuples located in non-leaf pages and high keys). Therefore, B-tree indexes
now might have variable number of attributes. This patch also provides
generic facility to support that: pivot tuples contain number of their
attributes in t_tid.ip_posid. Free 13th bit of t_info is used for indicating
that. This facility will simplify further support of index suffix truncation.
The changes of above are backward-compatible, pg_upgrade doesn't need special
handling of B-tree indexes for that.
Bump catalog version
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with contribition by Alexander Korotkov and me
Reviewed by: Peter Geoghegan, Tomas Vondra, Antonin Houska, Jeff Janes,
David Rowley, Alexander Korotkov
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/56168952.4010101@postgrespro.ru
As src/backend/access/transam/README says, PageGetLSN may only be called
by processes holding either exclusive lock on buffer, or a shared lock
on buffer plus buffer header lock. Therefore any place that only holds
a shared buffer lock must use BufferGetLSNAtomic instead of PageGetLSN,
which internally obtains buffer header lock prior to reading the LSN.
A few callsites failed to comply with this rule. This was detected by
running all tests under a new (not committed) assertion that verifies
PageGetLSN locking contract. All but one of the callsites that failed
the assertion are fixed by this patch. Remaining callsites were
inspected manually and determined not to need any change.
The exception (unfixed callsite) is in TestForOldSnapshot, which only
has a Page argument, making it impossible to access the corresponding
Buffer from it. Fixing that seems a much larger patch that will have to
be done separately; and that's just as well, since it was only
introduced in 9.6 and other bugs are much older.
Some of these bugs are ancient; backpatch all the way back to 9.3.
Authors: Jacob Champion, Asim Praveen, Ashwin Agrawal
Reviewed-by: Michaël Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CABAq_6GXgQDVu3u12mK9O5Xt5abBZWQ0V40LZCE+oUf95XyNFg@mail.gmail.com
The lower case spellings are C and C++ standard and are used in most
parts of the PostgreSQL sources. The upper case spellings are only used
in some files/modules. So standardize on the standard spellings.
The APIs for ICU, Perl, and Windows define their own TRUE and FALSE, so
those are left as is when using those APIs.
In code comments, we use the lower-case spelling for the C concepts and
keep the upper-case spelling for the SQL concepts.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4d wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
This isn't exposed to the optimizer or the executor yet; we'll add
support for those things in a separate patch. But this puts the
basic mechanism in place: several processes can attach to a parallel
btree index scan, and each one will get a subset of the tuples that
would have been produced by a non-parallel scan. Each index page
becomes the responsibility of a single worker, which then returns
all of the TIDs on that page.
Rahila Syed, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas, reviewed and tested by
Anastasia Lubennikova, Tushar Ahuja, and Haribabu Kommi.
The addition of a TestForOldSnapshot() call here has made the
referent of this comment slightly less clear, so move the comment
to compensate.
Amit Kapila (as part of the parallel index scan patch)
Commit 2ed5b87f96 introduced a bug in
mark/restore, in an attempt to optimize repeated restores to the
same page. This caused an assertion failure during a merge join
which fed directly from an index scan, although the impact would
not be limited to that case. Revert the bad chunk of code from
that commit.
While investigating this bug it was discovered that a particular
"paranoia" set of the mark position field would not prevent bad
behavior; it would just make it harder to diagnose. Change that
into an assertion, which will draw attention to any future problem
in that area more directly.
Backpatch to 9.5, where the bug was introduced.
Bug #14169 reported by Shinta Koyanagi.
Preliminary analysis by Tom Lane identified which commit caused
the bug.
The reverted changes were intended to force a choice of whether any
newly-added BufferGetPage() calls needed to be accompanied by a
test of the snapshot age, to support the "snapshot too old"
feature. Such an accompanying test is needed in about 7% of the
cases, where the page is being used as part of a scan rather than
positioning for other purposes (such as DML or vacuuming). The
additional effort required for back-patching, and the doubt whether
the intended benefit would really be there, have indicated it is
best just to rely on developers to do the right thing based on
comments and existing usage, as we do with many other conventions.
This change should have little or no effect on generated executable
code.
Motivated by the back-patching pain of Tom Lane and Robert Haas
This feature is controlled by a new old_snapshot_threshold GUC. A
value of -1 disables the feature, and that is the default. The
value of 0 is just intended for testing. Above that it is the
number of minutes a snapshot can reach before pruning and vacuum
are allowed to remove dead tuples which the snapshot would
otherwise protect. The xmin associated with a transaction ID does
still protect dead tuples. A connection which is using an "old"
snapshot does not get an error unless it accesses a page modified
recently enough that it might not be able to produce accurate
results.
This is similar to the Oracle feature, and we use the same SQLSTATE
and error message for compatibility.
This patch is a no-op patch which is intended to reduce the chances
of failures of omission once the functional part of the "snapshot
too old" patch goes in. It adds parameters for snapshot, relation,
and an enum to specify whether the snapshot age check needs to be
done for the page at this point. This initial patch passes NULL
for the first two new parameters and BGP_NO_SNAPSHOT_TEST for the
third. The follow-on patch will change the places where the test
needs to be made.
Now indexes (but only B-tree for now) can contain "extra" column(s) which
doesn't participate in index structure, they are just stored in leaf
tuples. It allows to use index only scan by using single index instead
of two or more indexes.
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with minor editorializing by me
Reviewers: David Rowley, Peter Geoghegan, Jeff Janes
606c0123d6 attempted to reduce cost of index scans using > and <
strategies, though got that completely wrong in a few complex cases.
Revert whole patch until we find a safe optimization.
Use "a" and "an" correctly, mostly in comments. Two error messages were
also fixed (they were just elogs, so no translation work required). Two
function comments in pg_proc.h were also fixed. Etsuro Fujita reported one
of these, but I found a lot more with grep.
Also fix a few other typos spotted while grepping for the a/an typos.
For example, "consists out of ..." -> "consists of ...". Plus a "though"/
"through" mixup reported by Euler Taveira.
Many of these typos were in old code, which would be nice to backpatch to
make future backpatching easier. But much of the code was new, and I didn't
feel like crafting separate patches for each branch. So no backpatching.
Even though the main benefit of the Lehman and Yao algorithm for
btrees is that no locks need be held between page reads in an
index search, we were holding a buffer pin on each leaf page after
it was read until we were ready to read the next one. The reason
was so that we could treat this as a weak lock to create an
"interlock" with vacuum's deletion of heap line pointers, even
though our README file pointed out that this was not necessary for
a scan using an MVCC snapshot.
The main goal of this patch is to reduce the blocking of vacuum
processes by in-progress btree index scans (including a cursor
which is idle), but the code rearrangement also allows for one
less buffer content lock to be taken when a forward scan steps from
one page to the next, which results in a small but consistent
performance improvement in many workloads.
This patch leaves behavior unchanged for some cases, which can be
addressed separately so that each case can be evaluated on its own
merits. These unchanged cases are when a scan uses a non-MVCC
snapshot, an index-only scan, and a scan of a btree index for which
modifications are not WAL-logged. If later patches allow all of
these cases to drop the buffer pin after reading a leaf page, then
the btree vacuum process can be simplified; it will no longer need
the "super-exclusive" lock to delete tuples from a page.
Reviewed by Heikki Linnakangas and Kyotaro Horiguchi
For <, <=, > and >= strategies, mark the first scan key
as already matched if scanning in an appropriate direction.
If index tuple contains no nulls we can skip the first
re-check for each tuple.
Author: Rajeev Rastogi
Reviewer: Haribabu Kommi
Rework of the code and comments by Simon Riggs
Splitting a page consists of two separate steps: splitting the child page,
and inserting the downlink for the new right page to the parent. Previously,
we handled the case that you crash in between those steps with a cleanup
routine after the WAL recovery had finished, which finished the incomplete
split. However, that doesn't help if the page split is interrupted but the
database doesn't crash, so that you don't perform WAL recovery. That could
happen for example if you run out of disk space.
Remove the end-of-recovery cleanup step. Instead, when a page is split, the
left page is marked with a new INCOMPLETE_SPLIT flag, and when the downlink
is inserted to the parent, the flag is cleared again. If an insertion sees
a page with the flag set, it knows that the split was interrupted for some
reason, and inserts the missing downlink before proceeding.
I used the same approach to fix GIN and GiST split algorithms earlier. This
was the last WAL cleanup routine, so we could get rid of that whole
machinery now, but I'll leave that for a separate patch.
Reviewed by Peter Geoghegan.
If we have an inequality key that constrains the other end of the index,
it doesn't directly help us in doing the initial positioning ... but it
does imply a NOT NULL constraint on the index column. If the index stores
nulls at this end, we can use the implied NOT NULL condition for initial
positioning, just as if it had been stated explicitly. This avoids wasting
time when there are a lot of nulls in the column. This is the reverse of
the examples given in bugs #6278 and #6283, which were about failing to
stop early when we encounter nulls at the end of the indexscan.
We copy all the matched tuples off the page during _bt_readpage, instead of
expensively re-locking the page during each subsequent tuple fetch. This
costs a bit more local storage, but not more than 2*BLCKSZ worth, and the
reduction in LWLock traffic is certainly worth that. What's more, this
lets us get rid of the API wart in the original patch that said an index AM
could randomly decline to supply an index tuple despite having asserted
pg_am.amcanreturn. That will be important for future improvements in the
index-only-scan feature, since the executor will now be able to rely on
having the index data available.
snapshots, like in REINDEX, are basically non-transactional operations. The
DDL operation itself might participate in SSI, but there's separate
functions for that.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, with some changes by me.
Since collation is effectively an argument, not a property of the function,
FmgrInfo is really the wrong place for it; and this becomes critical in
cases where a cached FmgrInfo is used for varying purposes that might need
different collation settings. Fix by passing it in FunctionCallInfoData
instead. In particular this allows a clean fix for bug #5970 (record_cmp
not working). This requires touching a bit more code than the original
method, but nobody ever thought that collations would not be an invasive
patch...
This adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.
Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
Peter Geoghegan
Andres Freund
Bruce Momjian
Magnus Hagander
Tom Lane
Alexander Korotkov
Amit Kapila
Teodor Sigaev
Alvaro Herrera
Robert Haas
Peter Eisentraut
Kevin Grittner
Simon Riggs
Heikki Linnakangas