isolationtester is now able to continue running other permutations when
it detects that one of them is invalid, which is useful during initial
development of spec files.
Author: Alexander Shulgin
A permutation that specifies more steps than defined causes
isolationtester to crash, so avoid that. Using less steps than defined
should probably not be a problem, but no spec currently does that.
I broke it in a previous commit because I neglected to install the
necessary incantations to have getopt() work on Windows.
Per red blots in buildfarm.
This mode prints out the permutations that would be run by the given
spec file, in the same format used by the permutation lines in spec
files. This helps in building new spec files.
Author: Alexander Shulgin, with some tweaks by me
We now report errors reported by the just-unblocked and unblocking
transactions identically; this should fix relatively common buildfarm
failures reported by animals that are failing the "wrong" session.
order of begin, prepare, and commit of three concurrent transactions that
have conflicts between them.
The test runs for a quite long time, and the expected output file is huge,
but this test caught some serious bugs during development, so seems
worthwhile to keep. The test uses prepared transactions, so it fails if the
server has max_prepared_transactions=0. Because of that, it's marked as
"ignore" in the schedule file.
Dan Ports
Noah Misch diagnosed the buildfarm problems in the isolation tests
partly as failure to differentiate backends properly; the old code was
using backend IDs, which is not good enough because a new backend might
use an already used ID. Use PIDs instead.
Also, the code was purposely careless about other concurrent activity,
because it isn't expected; and in fact, it doesn't affect the vast
majority of the time. However, it can be observed that autovacuum can
block tables for long enough to cause sporadic failures. The new code
accounts for that by ignoring locks held by processes not explicitly
declared in our spec file.
Author: Noah Misch
This enables us to test that blocking commands (such as foreign keys
checks that conflict with some other lock) act as intended. The set of
tests that this adds is pretty minimal, but can easily be extended by
adding new specs.
The intention is that this will serve as a basis for ensuring that
further tweaks of locking implementation preserve (or improve) existing
behavior.
Author: Noah Misch
Remove random system #includes in favor of using postgres_fe.h. (The
alternative to that is letting this module grow its own configuration
testing ability...)
Also fix the "make clean" target to actually clean things up.
Per local testing.
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
Alvaro Herrera
Heikki Linnakangas
Tom Lane
Bruce Momjian