existing lock manager and spinlocks: it understands exclusive vs shared
lock but has few other fancy features. Replace most uses of spinlocks
with lightweight locks. All remaining uses of spinlocks have very short
lock hold times (a few dozen instructions), so tweak spinlock backoff
code to work efficiently given this assumption. All per my proposal on
pghackers 26-Sep-01.
default, but OIDS are removed from many system catalogs that don't need them.
Some interesting side effects: TOAST pointers are 20 bytes not 32 now;
pg_description has a three-column key instead of one.
Bugs fixed in passing: BINARY cursors work again; pg_class.relhaspkey
has some usefulness; pg_dump dumps comments on indexes, rules, and
triggers in a valid order.
initdb forced.
per previous discussion on pghackers. Most of the duplicate code in
different AMs' ambuild routines has been moved out to a common routine
in index.c; this means that all index types now do the right things about
inserting recently-dead tuples, etc. (I also removed support for EXTEND
INDEX in the ambuild routines, since that's about to go away anyway, and
it cluttered the code a lot.) The retail indextuple deletion routines have
been replaced by a "bulk delete" routine in which the indexscan is inside
the access method. I haven't pushed this change as far as it should go yet,
but it should allow considerable simplification of the internal bookkeeping
for deletions. Also, add flag columns to pg_am to eliminate various
hardcoded tests on AM OIDs, and remove unused pg_am columns.
Fix rtree and gist index types to not attempt to store NULLs; before this,
gist usually crashed, while rtree managed not to crash but computed wacko
bounding boxes for NULL entries (which might have had something to do with
the performance problems we've heard about occasionally).
Add AtEOXact routines to hash, rtree, and gist, all of which have static
state that needs to be reset after an error. We discovered this need long
ago for btree, but missed the other guys.
Oh, one more thing: concurrent VACUUM is now the default.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane