Repeatedly rewriting a mapped catalog table with VACUUM FULL or
CLUSTER could cause logical decoding to fail with:
ERROR, "could not map filenode \"%s\" to relation OID"
To trigger the problem the rewritten catalog had to have live tuples
with toasted columns.
The problem was triggered as during catalog table rewrites the
heap_insert() check that prevents logical decoding information to be
emitted for system catalogs, failed to treat the new heap's toast table
as a system catalog (because the new heap is not recognized as a
catalog table via RelationIsLogicallyLogged()). The relmapper, in
contrast to the normal catalog contents, does not contain historical
information. After a single rewrite of a mapped table the new relation
is known to the relmapper, but if the table is rewritten twice before
logical decoding occurs, the relfilenode cannot be mapped to a
relation anymore. Which then leads us to error out. This only
happens for toast tables, because the main table contents aren't
re-inserted with heap_insert().
The fix is simple, add a new heap_insert() flag that prevents logical
decoding information from being emitted, and accept during decoding
that there might not be tuple data for toast tables.
Unfortunately that does not fix pre-existing logical decoding
errors. Doing so would require not throwing an error when a filenode
cannot be mapped to a relation during decoding, and that seems too
likely to hide bugs. If it's crucial to fix decoding for an existing
slot, temporarily changing the ERROR in ReorderBufferCommit() to a
WARNING appears to be the best fix.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180914021046.oi7dm4ra3ot2g2kt@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.4-, where logical decoding was introduced
The regression tests for contrib/test_decoding regularly failed on
postgres instances that were very slow. Either because the hardware
itself was slow or because very expensive debugging options like
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS were used.
The reason they failed was just that some additional transactions were
decoded. Analyze and vacuum, triggered by autovac.
To fix just add a option to test_decoding to only display transactions
in which a change was actually displayed. That's not pretty because it
removes information from the tests; but better than constantly failing
tests in very likely harmless ways.
Backpatch to 9.4 where logical decoding was introduced.
Discussion: 20140629142511.GA26930@awork2.anarazel.de
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables. The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included. To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.
Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.
Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.
Andres Freund
Robert Haas