Commit Graph

12524 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Alvaro Herrera
7bafffea64 pgbench: Allow changing weights for scripts
Previously, all scripts had the same probability of being chosen when
multiple of them were specified via -b, -f, -N, -S.  With this commit,
-b and -f now search for an "@" in the script name and use the integer
found after it as the drawing probability for that script.

(One disadvantage is that if you have script whose names contain @, you
are now forced to specify "@1" at the end; otherwise the name's @ is
confused with a weight separator.  We don't expect many pgbench script
with @ in their names in the wild, so this shouldn't be too serious a
problem.)

While at it, rework the interface between addScript, process_file,
process_builtin, and findBuiltin.  It had gotten a bit out of hand with
recent commits.

Author: Fabien Coelho
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Álvaro Herrera, Michaël Paquier
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/alpine.DEB.2.10.1603160721240.1666@sto
2016-03-19 12:32:42 -03:00
Peter Eisentraut
9a83564c58 Allow SSL server key file to have group read access if owned by root
We used to require the server key file to have permissions 0600 or less
for best security.  But some systems (such as Debian) have certificate
and key files managed by the operating system that can be shared with
other services.  In those cases, the "postgres" user is made a member of
a special group that has access to those files, and the server key file
has permissions 0640.  To accommodate that kind of setup, also allow the
key file to have permissions 0640 but only if owned by root.

From: Christoph Berg <myon@debian.org>
Reviewed-by: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>
2016-03-19 11:03:22 +01:00
Peter Eisentraut
b555ed8102 Merge wal_level "archive" and "hot_standby" into new name "replica"
The distinction between "archive" and "hot_standby" existed only because
at the time "hot_standby" was added, there was some uncertainty about
stability.  This is now a long time ago.  We would like to move forward
with simplifying the replication configuration, but this distinction is
in the way, because a primary server cannot tell (without asking a
standby or predicting the future) which one of these would be the
appropriate level.

Pick a new name for the combined setting to make it clearer that it
covers all (non-logical) backup and replication uses.  The old values
are still accepted but are converted internally.

Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: David Steele <david@pgmasters.net>
2016-03-18 23:56:03 +01:00
Robert Haas
0bf3ae88af Directly modify foreign tables.
postgres_fdw can now sent an UPDATE or DELETE statement directly to
the foreign server in simple cases, rather than sending a SELECT FOR
UPDATE statement and then updating or deleting rows one-by-one.

Etsuro Fujita, reviewed by Rushabh Lathia, Shigeru Hanada, Kyotaro
Horiguchi, Albe Laurenz, Thom Brown, and me.
2016-03-18 13:55:52 -04:00
Teodor Sigaev
61d2ebdbf9 Fix a typo
Erik Rijkers
2016-03-18 18:49:24 +03:00
Teodor Sigaev
3187d6de0e Introduce parse_ident()
SQL-layer function to split qualified identifier into array parts.

Author: Pavel Stehule with minor editorization by me and Jim Nasby
2016-03-18 18:16:14 +03:00
Alvaro Herrera
696684d878 docs: Fix typo'd brin_summarize_new_values
I wrote "brin_summarize_new_pages" instead, in docs as well as in the
commit message of commit ac443d1034.

Bug: #14030
Reported-By: Chris Pacejo
2016-03-17 20:17:04 -03:00
Peter Eisentraut
fc201dfd95 Add syslog_split_messages parameter
Reviewed-by: Andreas Karlsson <andreas@proxel.se>
2016-03-16 23:21:44 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut
f4c454e9ba Add syslog_sequence_numbers parameter
Reviewed-by: Andreas Karlsson <andreas@proxel.se>
2016-03-16 23:21:44 -04:00
Teodor Sigaev
f576b17cd6 Add word_similarity to pg_trgm contrib module.
Patch introduces a concept of similarity over string and just a word from
another string.

Version of extension is not changed because 1.2 was already introduced in 9.6
release cycle, so, there wasn't a public version.

Author: Alexander Korotkov, Artur Zakirov
2016-03-16 18:59:21 +03:00
Robert Haas
1c4f001b79 Fix typo.
Amit Langote
2016-03-16 11:38:30 -04:00
Robert Haas
c6dda1f48e Add idle_in_transaction_session_timeout.
Vik Fearing, reviewed by Stéphane Schildknecht and me, and revised
slightly by me.
2016-03-16 11:30:45 -04:00
Teodor Sigaev
5871b88487 GUC variable pg_trgm.similarity_threshold insead of set_limit()
Use GUC variable pg_trgm.similarity_threshold insead of
set_limit()/show_limit() which was introduced when defining GUC varuables
by modules was absent.

Author: Artur Zakirov
2016-03-16 17:44:58 +03:00
Robert Haas
3aff33aa68 Fix typos.
Oskari Saarenmaa
2016-03-15 18:06:11 -04:00
Robert Haas
2a90cb69e1 Fix typos.
Thomas Reiss
2016-03-15 16:28:17 -04:00
Robert Haas
c16dc1aca5 Add simple VACUUM progress reporting.
There's a lot more that could be done here yet - in particular, this
reports only very coarse-grained information about the index vacuuming
phase - but even as it stands, the new pg_stat_progress_vacuum can
tell you quite a bit about what a long-running vacuum is actually
doing.

Amit Langote and Robert Haas, based on earlier work by Vinayak Pokale
and Rahila Syed.
2016-03-15 13:32:56 -04:00
Tom Lane
101fd9349e Add a GetForeignUpperPaths callback function for FDWs.
This is basically like the just-added create_upper_paths_hook, but
control is funneled only to the FDW responsible for all the baserels
of the current query; so providing such a callback is much less likely
to add useless overhead than using the hook function is.

The documentation is a bit sketchy.  We'll likely want to improve it,
and/or adjust the call conventions, when we get some experience with
actually using this callback.  Hopefully somebody will find time to
experiment with it before 9.6 feature freeze.
2016-03-14 20:04:48 -04:00
Tom Lane
307c78852f Rethink representation of PathTargets.
In commit 19a541143a I did not make PathTarget a subtype of Node,
and embedded a RelOptInfo's reltarget directly into it rather than having
a separately-allocated Node.  In hindsight that was misguided
micro-optimization, enabled by the fact that at that point we didn't have
any Paths with custom PathTargets.  Now that PathTarget processing has
been fleshed out some more, it's easier to see that it's better to have
PathTarget as an indepedent Node type, even if it does cost us one more
palloc to create a RelOptInfo.  So change it while we still can.

This commit just changes the representation, without doing anything more
interesting than that.
2016-03-14 16:59:59 -04:00
Tom Lane
9da70efcbe Mop-up for setting minimum Tcl version to 8.4.
Commit e2609323e set the minimum Tcl version we support to 8.4, but
I forgot to adjust the documentation to say the same.  Some nosing
around for other consequences found that the configure script could
be simplified slightly as well.
2016-03-13 17:14:49 -04:00
Magnus Hagander
7a8d874836 Rename auto_explain.sample_ratio to sample_rate
Per suggestion from Tomas Vondra

Author: Julien Rouhaud
2016-03-13 13:18:03 +01:00
Tom Lane
23a27b039d Widen query numbers-of-tuples-processed counters to uint64.
This patch widens SPI_processed, EState's es_processed field, PortalData's
portalPos field, FuncCallContext's call_cntr and max_calls fields,
ExecutorRun's count argument, PortalRunFetch's result, and the max number
of rows in a SPITupleTable to uint64, and deals with (I hope) all the
ensuing fallout.  Some of these values were declared uint32 before, and
others "long".

I also removed PortalData's posOverflow field, since that logic seems
pretty useless given that portalPos is now always 64 bits.

The user-visible results are that command tags for SELECT etc will
correctly report tuple counts larger than 4G, as will plpgsql's GET
GET DIAGNOSTICS ... ROW_COUNT command.  Queries processing more tuples
than that are still not exactly the norm, but they're becoming more
common.

Most values associated with FETCH/MOVE distances, such as PortalRun's count
argument and the count argument of most SPI functions that have one, remain
declared as "long".  It's not clear whether it would be worth promoting
those to int64; but it would definitely be a large dollop of additional
API churn on top of this, and it would only help 32-bit platforms which
seem relatively less likely to see any benefit.

Andreas Scherbaum, reviewed by Christian Ullrich, additional hacking by me
2016-03-12 16:05:29 -05:00
Tom Lane
9118d03a8c When appropriate, postpone SELECT output expressions till after ORDER BY.
It is frequently useful for volatile, set-returning, or expensive functions
in a SELECT's targetlist to be postponed till after ORDER BY and LIMIT are
done.  Otherwise, the functions might be executed for every row of the
table despite the presence of LIMIT, and/or be executed in an unexpected
order.  For example, in
	SELECT x, nextval('seq') FROM tab ORDER BY x LIMIT 10;
it's probably desirable that the nextval() values are ordered the same
as x, and that nextval() is not run more than 10 times.

In the past, Postgres was inconsistent in this area: you would get the
desirable behavior if the ordering were performed via an indexscan, but
not if it had to be done by an explicit sort step.  Getting the desired
behavior reliably required contortions like
	SELECT x, nextval('seq')
	  FROM (SELECT x FROM tab ORDER BY x) ss LIMIT 10;

This patch conditionally postpones evaluation of pure-output target
expressions (that is, those that are not used as DISTINCT, ORDER BY, or
GROUP BY columns) so that they effectively occur after sorting, even if an
explicit sort step is necessary.  Volatile expressions and set-returning
expressions are always postponed, so as to provide consistent semantics.
Expensive expressions (costing more than 10 times typical operator cost,
which by default would include any user-defined function) are postponed
if there is a LIMIT or if there are expressions that must be postponed.

We could be more aggressive and postpone any nontrivial expression, but
there are costs associated with doing so: it requires an extra Result plan
node which adds some overhead, and postponement changes the volume of data
going through the sort step, perhaps for the worse.  Since we tend not to
have very good estimates of the output width of nontrivial expressions,
it's hard to have much confidence in our ability to predict whether
postponement would increase or decrease the cost of the sort; therefore
this patch doesn't attempt to make decisions conditionally on that.
Between these factors and a general desire not to change query behavior
when there's not a demonstrable benefit, it seems best to be conservative
about applying postponement.  We might tweak the decision rules in the
future, though.

Konstantin Knizhnik, heavily rewritten by me
2016-03-11 12:27:50 -05:00
Teodor Sigaev
6943a946c7 Tsvector editing functions
Adds several tsvector editting function: convert tsvector to/from text array,
set weight for given lexemes, delete lexeme(s), unnest, filter lexemes
with given weights

Author: Stas Kelvich with some editorization by me
Reviewers: Tomas Vondram, Teodor Sigaev
2016-03-11 19:22:36 +03:00
Magnus Hagander
92f03fe76f Allow setting sample ratio for auto_explain
New configuration parameter auto_explain.sample_ratio makes it
possible to log just a fraction of the queries meeting the configured
threshold, to reduce the amount of logging.

Author: Craig Ringer and Julien Rouhaud
Review: Petr Jelinek
2016-03-11 15:08:34 +01:00
Robert Haas
69ab7b9d6c psql: Don't automatically use expanded format when there's 1 column.
Andreas Karlsson and Robert Haas
2016-03-11 08:04:01 -05:00
Andres Freund
428b1d6b29 Allow to trigger kernel writeback after a configurable number of writes.
Currently writes to the main data files of postgres all go through the
OS page cache. This means that some operating systems can end up
collecting a large number of dirty buffers in their respective page
caches.  When these dirty buffers are flushed to storage rapidly, be it
because of fsync(), timeouts, or dirty ratios, latency for other reads
and writes can increase massively.  This is the primary reason for
regular massive stalls observed in real world scenarios and artificial
benchmarks; on rotating disks stalls on the order of hundreds of seconds
have been observed.

On linux it is possible to control this by reducing the global dirty
limits significantly, reducing the above problem. But global
configuration is rather problematic because it'll affect other
applications; also PostgreSQL itself doesn't always generally want this
behavior, e.g. for temporary files it's undesirable.

Several operating systems allow some control over the kernel page
cache. Linux has sync_file_range(2), several posix systems have msync(2)
and posix_fadvise(2). sync_file_range(2) is preferable because it
requires no special setup, whereas msync() requires the to-be-flushed
range to be mmap'ed. For the purpose of flushing dirty data
posix_fadvise(2) is the worst alternative, as flushing dirty data is
just a side-effect of POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED, which also removes the pages
from the page cache.  Thus the feature is enabled by default only on
linux, but can be enabled on all systems that have any of the above
APIs.

While desirable and likely possible this patch does not contain an
implementation for windows.

With the infrastructure added, writes made via checkpointer, bgwriter
and normal user backends can be flushed after a configurable number of
writes. Each of these sources of writes controlled by a separate GUC,
checkpointer_flush_after, bgwriter_flush_after and backend_flush_after
respectively; they're separate because the number of flushes that are
good are separate, and because the performance considerations of
controlled flushing for each of these are different.

A later patch will add checkpoint sorting - after that flushes from the
ckeckpoint will almost always be desirable. Bgwriter flushes are most of
the time going to be random, which are slow on lots of storage hardware.
Flushing in backends works well if the storage and bgwriter can keep up,
but if not it can have negative consequences.  This patch is likely to
have negative performance consequences without checkpoint sorting, but
unfortunately so has sorting without flush control.

Discussion: alpine.DEB.2.10.1506011320000.28433@sto
Author: Fabien Coelho and Andres Freund
2016-03-10 17:04:34 -08:00
Robert Haas
fd31cd2651 Don't vacuum all-frozen pages.
Commit a892234f83 gave us enough
infrastructure to avoid vacuuming pages where every tuple on the
page is already frozen.  So, replace the notion of a scan_all or
whole-table vacuum with the less onerous notion of an "aggressive"
vacuum, which will pages that are all-visible, but still skip those
that are all-frozen.

This should greatly reduce the cost of anti-wraparound vacuuming
on large clusters where the majority of data is never touched
between one cycle and the next, because we'll no longer have to
read all of those pages only to find out that we don't need to
do anything with them.

Patch by me, reviewed by Masahiko Sawada.
2016-03-10 16:14:42 -05:00
Robert Haas
53be0b1add Provide much better wait information in pg_stat_activity.
When a process is waiting for a heavyweight lock, we will now indicate
the type of heavyweight lock for which it is waiting.  Also, you can
now see when a process is waiting for a lightweight lock - in which
case we will indicate the individual lock name or the tranche, as
appropriate - or for a buffer pin.

Amit Kapila, Ildus Kurbangaliev, reviewed by me.  Lots of helpful
discussion and suggestions by many others, including Alexander
Korotkov, Vladimir Borodin, and many others.
2016-03-10 12:44:09 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera
a3a8309d45 Document BRIN a bit more thoroughly
The chapter "Interfacing Extensions To Indexes" and CREATE OPERATOR
CLASS reference page were missed when BRIN was added.  We document
all our other index access methods there, so make sure BRIN complies.

Author: Álvaro Herrera
Reported-By: Julien Rouhaud, Tom Lane
Reviewed-By: Emre Hasegeli
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/56CF604E.9000303%40dalibo.com
Backpatch: 9.5, where BRIN was introduced
2016-03-10 13:15:08 -03:00
Simon Riggs
fcb4bfddb6 Reduce lock level for altering fillfactor
Fabrízio de Royes Mello and Simon Riggs
2016-03-10 12:07:33 +00:00
Peter Eisentraut
e19e4cf0be doc: Reorganize pg_resetxlog reference page
The pg_resetxlog reference page didn't have a proper options list, only
running text listing the options and some explanations of them.  This
might have worked when there were only a few options, but the list has
grown over the releases, and now it's hard to find an option and its
associated explanation.  So write out the options list as on other
reference pages.
2016-03-09 21:26:06 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera
188f359d39 pgcrypto: support changing S2K iteration count
pgcrypto already supports key-stretching during symmetric encryption,
including the salted-and-iterated method; but the number of iterations
was not configurable.  This commit implements a new s2k-count parameter
to pgp_sym_encrypt() which permits selecting a larger number of
iterations.

Author: Jeff Janes
2016-03-09 14:31:07 -03:00
Robert Haas
dff7ad3c61 Update GetForeignPlan documentation.
Commit 385f337c9f added a new argument
to the FDW GetForeignPlan method, but failed to update the documentation
to match.

Etsuro Fujita
2016-03-08 14:30:12 -05:00
Robert Haas
272baaa538 Fix typo.
Masahiko Sawada
2016-03-08 13:28:00 -05:00
Robert Haas
ba0a198fb1 Add pg_visibility contrib module.
This lets you examine the visibility map as well as page-level
visibility information.  I initially wrote it as a debugging aid,
but was encouraged to polish it for commit.

Patch by me, reviewed by Masahiko Sawada.

Discussion: 56D77803.6080503@BlueTreble.com
2016-03-08 08:42:01 -05:00
Tom Lane
a93aec4e0f Fix minor typo in logical-decoding docs.
David Rowley
2016-03-07 21:52:30 -05:00
Tom Lane
3fc6e2d7f5 Make the upper part of the planner work by generating and comparing Paths.
I've been saying we needed to do this for more than five years, and here it
finally is.  This patch removes the ever-growing tangle of spaghetti logic
that grouping_planner() used to use to try to identify the best plan for
post-scan/join query steps.  Now, there is (nearly) independent
consideration of each execution step, and entirely separate construction of
Paths to represent each of the possible ways to do that step.  We choose
the best Path or set of Paths using the same add_path() logic that's been
used inside query_planner() for years.

In addition, this patch removes the old restriction that subquery_planner()
could return only a single Plan.  It now returns a RelOptInfo containing a
set of Paths, just as query_planner() does, and the parent query level can
use each of those Paths as the basis of a SubqueryScanPath at its level.
This allows finding some optimizations that we missed before, wherein a
subquery was capable of returning presorted data and thereby avoiding a
sort in the parent level, making the overall cost cheaper even though
delivering sorted output was not the cheapest plan for the subquery in
isolation.  (A couple of regression test outputs change in consequence of
that.  However, there is very little change in visible planner behavior
overall, because the point of this patch is not to get immediate planning
benefits but to create the infrastructure for future improvements.)

There is a great deal left to do here.  This patch unblocks a lot of
planner work that was basically impractical in the old code structure,
such as allowing FDWs to implement remote aggregation, or rewriting
plan_set_operations() to allow consideration of multiple implementation
orders for set operations.  (The latter will likely require a full
rewrite of plan_set_operations(); what I've done here is only to fix it
to return Paths not Plans.)  I have also left unfinished some localized
refactoring in createplan.c and planner.c, because it was not necessary
to get this patch to a working state.

Thanks to Robert Haas, David Rowley, and Amit Kapila for review.
2016-03-07 15:58:22 -05:00
Magnus Hagander
2b46259b46 Fix typos
Author: Guillaume Lelarge
2016-03-06 12:25:47 +01:00
Joe Conway
dc7d70ea05 Expose control file data via SQL accessible functions.
Add four new SQL accessible functions: pg_control_system(),
pg_control_checkpoint(), pg_control_recovery(), and pg_control_init()
which expose a subset of the control file data.

Along the way move the code to read and validate the control file to
src/common, where it can be shared by the new backend functions
and the original pg_controldata frontend program.

Patch by me, significant input, testing, and review by Michael Paquier.
2016-03-05 11:10:19 -08:00
Fujii Masao
d34794f7d5 Ignore recovery_min_apply_delay until recovery has reached consistent state
Previously recovery_min_apply_delay was applied even before recovery
had reached consistency. This could cause us to wait a long time
unexpectedly for read-only connections to be allowed. It's problematic
because the standby was useless during that wait time.

This patch changes recovery_min_apply_delay so that it's applied once
the database has reached the consistent state. That is, even if the delay
is set, the standby tries to replay WAL records as fast as possible until
it has reached consistency.

Author: Michael Paquier
Reviewed-By: Julien Rouhaud
Reported-By: Greg Clough
Backpatch: 9.4, where recovery_min_apply_delay was added
Bug: #13770
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151111155006.2644.84564@wrigleys.postgresql.org
2016-03-06 02:29:04 +09:00
Teodor Sigaev
d78a7d9c7f Improve support of Hunspell in ispell dictionary.
Now it's possible to load recent version of Hunspell for several languages.
To handle these dictionaries Hunspell patch adds support for:
* FLAG long - sets the double extended ASCII character flag type
* FLAG num - sets the decimal number flag type (from 1 to 65535)
* AF parameter - alias for flag's set

Also it moves test dictionaries into separate directory.

Author: Artur Zakirov with editorization by me
2016-03-04 20:08:47 +03:00
Robert Haas
33b5eab7ab Fix the way GetExistingLocalJoinPath is documented.
The old approach made it look like it was an FDW callback, which it
is not.

Per a gripe from Stephen Frost.  Patch by me, reviewed by Ashutosh
Bapat.
2016-03-04 11:44:17 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera
d561f1caec pgbench: accept unambiguous builtin prefixes for -b
This makes it easier to use "-b se" instead of typing the full "-b
select-only".

Author: Fabien Coelho
Reviewed-by: Michaël Paquier
2016-03-03 19:37:13 -03:00
Robert Haas
a892234f83 Change the format of the VM fork to add a second bit per page.
The new bit indicates whether every tuple on the page is already frozen.
It is cleared only when the all-visible bit is cleared, and it can be
set only when we vacuum a page and find that every tuple on that page is
both visible to every transaction and in no need of any future
vacuuming.

A future commit will use this new bit to optimize away full-table scans
that would otherwise be triggered by XID wraparound considerations.  A
page which is merely all-visible must still be scanned in that case, but
a page which is all-frozen need not be.  This commit does not attempt
that optimization, although that optimization is the goal here.  It
seems better to get the basic infrastructure in place first.

Per discussion, it's very desirable for pg_upgrade to automatically
migrate existing VM forks from the old format to the new format.  That,
too, will be handled in a follow-on patch.

Masahiko Sawada, reviewed by Kyotaro Horiguchi, Fujii Masao, Amit
Kapila, Simon Riggs, Andres Freund, and others, and substantially
revised by me.
2016-03-01 21:49:41 -05:00
Robert Haas
7e137f846d Extend pgbench's expression syntax to support a few built-in functions.
Fabien Coelho, reviewed mostly by Michael Paquier and me, but also by
Heikki Linnakangas, BeomYong Lee, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Oleksander
Shulgin, and Álvaro Herrera.
2016-03-01 13:08:30 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera
5847397dec Minor tweaks for new src/test/recovery
Author: Michael Paquier
2016-02-29 18:16:59 -03:00
Alvaro Herrera
1c7c189fc1 doc: document MANPATH as /usr/local/pgsql/share/man
The docs were advising to use /usr/local/pgsql/man instead, but that's
wrong.

Reported-By: Slawomir Sudnik
Backpatch-To: 9.1
Bug: #13894
2016-02-29 17:53:55 -03:00
Alvaro Herrera
49148645f7 Add a test framework for recovery
This long-awaited framework is an expansion of the existing PostgresNode
stuff to support additional features for recovery testing; the recovery
tests included in this commit are a starting point that cover some of
the recovery features we have.  More scripts are expected to be added
later.

Author: Michaël Paquier, a bit of help from Amir Rohan
Reviewed by: Amir Rohan, Stas Kelvich, Kyotaro Horiguchi, Victor Wagner,
Craig Ringer, Álvaro Herrera
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAB7nPqTf7V6rswrFa=q_rrWeETUWagP=h8LX8XAov2Jcxw0DRg@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/trinity-b4a8035d-59af-4c42-a37e-258f0f28e44a-1443795007012@3capp-mailcom-lxa08
2016-02-26 16:13:30 -03:00
Robert Haas
35746bc348 Add new FDW API to test for parallel-safety.
This is basically a bug fix; the old code assumes that a ForeignScan
is always parallel-safe, but for postgres_fdw, for example, this is
definitely false.  It should be true for file_fdw, though, since a
worker can read a file from the filesystem just as well as any other
backend process.

Original patch by Thomas Munro.  Documentation, and changes to the
comments, by me.
2016-02-26 16:14:46 +05:30
Tom Lane
52f5d578d6 Create a function to reliably identify which sessions block which others.
This patch introduces "pg_blocking_pids(int) returns int[]", which returns
the PIDs of any sessions that are blocking the session with the given PID.
Historically people have obtained such information using a self-join on
the pg_locks view, but it's unreasonably tedious to do it that way with any
modicum of correctness, and the addition of parallel queries has pretty
much broken that approach altogether.  (Given some more columns in the view
than there are today, you could imagine handling parallel-query cases with
a 4-way join; but ugh.)

The new function has the following behaviors that are painful or impossible
to get right via pg_locks:

1. Correctly understands which lock modes block which other ones.

2. In soft-block situations (two processes both waiting for conflicting lock
modes), only the one that's in front in the wait queue is reported to
block the other.

3. In parallel-query cases, reports all sessions blocking any member of
the given PID's lock group, and reports a session by naming its leader
process's PID, which will be the pg_backend_pid() value visible to
clients.

The motivation for doing this right now is mostly to fix the isolation
tests.  Commit 38f8bdcac4 lobotomized
isolationtester's is-it-waiting query by removing its ability to recognize
nonconflicting lock modes, as a crude workaround for the inability to
handle soft-block situations properly.  But even without the lock mode
tests, the old query was excessively slow, particularly in
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS builds; some of our buildfarm animals fail the new
deadlock-hard test because the deadlock timeout elapses before they can
probe the waiting status of all eight sessions.  Replacing the pg_locks
self-join with use of pg_blocking_pids() is not only much more correct, but
a lot faster: I measure it at about 9X faster in a typical dev build with
Asserts, and 3X faster in CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS builds.  That should provide
enough headroom for the slower CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS animals to pass the
test, without having to lengthen deadlock_timeout yet more and thus slow
down the test for everyone else.
2016-02-22 14:31:43 -05:00