Up to now, it's been safe for plpgsql to store TOAST pointers in its
variables because the ActiveSnapshot for whatever query called the plpgsql
function will surely protect such TOAST values from being vacuumed away,
even if the owning table rows are committed dead. With the introduction of
procedures, that assumption is no longer good in "non atomic" executions
of plpgsql code. We adopt the slightly brute-force solution of detoasting
all TOAST pointers at the time they are stored into variables, if we're in
a non-atomic context, just in case the owning row goes away.
Some care is needed to avoid long-term memory leaks, since plpgsql tends
to run with CurrentMemoryContext pointing to its call-lifespan context,
but we shouldn't assume that no memory is leaked by heap_tuple_fetch_attr.
In plpgsql proper, we can do the detoasting work in the "eval_mcontext".
Most of the code thrashing here is due to the need to add this capability
to expandedrecord.c as well as plpgsql proper. In expandedrecord.c,
we can't assume that the caller's context is short-lived, so make use of
the short-term sub-context that was already invented for checking domain
constraints. In view of this repurposing, it seems good to rename that
variable and associated code from "domain_check_cxt" to "short_term_cxt".
Peter Eisentraut and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/5AC06865.9050005@anastigmatix.net
Formerly, DTYPE_REC was used only for variables declared as "record";
variables of named composite types used DTYPE_ROW, which is faster for
some purposes but much less flexible. In particular, the ROW code paths
are entirely incapable of dealing with DDL-caused changes to the number
or data types of the columns of a row variable, once a particular plpgsql
function has been parsed for the first time in a session. And, since the
stored representation of a ROW isn't a tuple, there wasn't any easy way
to deal with variables of domain-over-composite types, since the domain
constraint checking code would expect the value to be checked to be a
tuple. A lesser, but still real, annoyance is that ROW format cannot
represent a true NULL composite value, only a row of per-field NULL
values, which is not exactly the same thing.
Hence, switch to using DTYPE_REC for all composite-typed variables,
whether "record", named composite type, or domain over named composite
type. DTYPE_ROW remains but is used only for its native purpose, to
represent a fixed-at-compile-time list of variables, for instance the
targets of an INTO clause.
To accomplish this without taking significant performance losses, introduce
infrastructure that allows storing composite-type variables as "expanded
objects", similar to the "expanded array" infrastructure introduced in
commit 1dc5ebc90. A composite variable's value is thereby kept (most of
the time) in the form of separate Datums, so that field accesses and
updates are not much more expensive than they were in the ROW format.
This holds the line, more or less, on performance of variables of named
composite types in field-access-intensive microbenchmarks, and makes
variables declared "record" perform much better than before in similar
tests. In addition, the logic involved with enforcing composite-domain
constraints against updates of individual fields is in the expanded
record infrastructure not plpgsql proper, so that it might be reusable
for other purposes.
In further support of this, introduce a typcache feature for assigning a
unique-within-process identifier to each distinct tuple descriptor of
interest; in particular, DDL alterations on composite types result in a new
identifier for that type. This allows very cheap detection of the need to
refresh tupdesc-dependent data. This improves on the "tupDescSeqNo" idea
I had in commit 687f096ea: that assigned identifying sequence numbers to
successive versions of individual composite types, but the numbers were not
unique across different types, nor was there support for assigning numbers
to registered record types.
In passing, allow plpgsql functions to accept as well as return type
"record". There was no good reason for the old restriction, and it
was out of step with most of the other PLs.
Tom Lane, reviewed by Pavel Stehule
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/8962.1514399547@sss.pgh.pa.us
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane