Commit Graph

83 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Kevin Grittner 4deb413813 Add isolation test for SERIALIZABLE READ ONLY DEFERRABLE.
This improves code coverage and lays a foundation for testing
similar issues in a distributed environment.

Author: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@enterprisedb.com>
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
2017-04-05 10:04:36 -05:00
Andrew Gierth 1914c5ea7d Avoid having vacuum set reltuples to 0 on non-empty relations in the
presence of page pins, which leads to serious estimation errors in the
planner.  This particularly affects small heavily-accessed tables,
especially where locking (e.g. from FK constraints) forces frequent
vacuums for mxid cleanup.

Fix by keeping separate track of pages whose live tuples were actually
counted vs. pages that were only scanned for freezing purposes.  Thus,
reltuples can only be set to 0 if all pages of the relation were
actually counted.

Backpatch to all supported versions.

Per bug #14057 from Nicolas Baccelli, analyzed by me.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20160331103739.8956.94469@wrigleys.postgresql.org
2017-03-16 22:28:03 +00:00
Tom Lane a6c0a5b6e8 Don't throw serialization errors for self-conflicts in INSERT ON CONFLICT.
A transaction that conflicts against itself, for example
	INSERT INTO t(pk) VALUES (1),(1) ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING;
should behave the same regardless of isolation level.  It certainly
shouldn't throw a serialization error, as retrying will not help.
We got this wrong due to the ON CONFLICT logic not considering the case,
as reported by Jason Dusek.

Core of this patch is by Peter Geoghegan (based on an earlier patch by
Thomas Munro), though I didn't take his proposed code refactoring for fear
that it might have unexpected side-effects.  Test cases by Thomas Munro
and myself.

Report: <CAO3NbwOycQjt2Oqy2VW-eLTq2M5uGMyHnGm=RNga4mjqcYD7gQ@mail.gmail.com>
Related-Discussion: <57EE93C8.8080504@postgrespro.ru>
2016-10-23 18:36:13 -04:00
Andres Freund 07ef035129 Fix deletion of speculatively inserted TOAST on conflict
INSERT ..  ON CONFLICT runs a pre-check of the possible conflicting
constraints before performing the actual speculative insertion.  In case
the inserted tuple included TOASTed columns the ON CONFLICT condition
would be handled correctly in case the conflict was caught by the
pre-check, but if two transactions entered the speculative insertion
phase at the same time, one would have to re-try, and the code for
aborting a speculative insertion did not handle deleting the
speculatively inserted TOAST datums correctly.

TOAST deletion would fail with "ERROR: attempted to delete invisible
tuple" as we attempted to remove the TOAST tuples using
simple_heap_delete which reasoned that the given tuples should not be
visible to the command that wrote them.

This commit updates the heap_abort_speculative() function which aborts
the conflicting tuple to use itself, via toast_delete, for deleting
associated TOAST datums.  Like before, the inserted toast rows are not
marked as being speculative.

This commit also adds a isolationtester spec test, exercising the
relevant code path. Unfortunately 9.5 cannot handle two waiting
sessions, and thus cannot execute this test.

Reported-By: Viren Negi, Oskari Saarenmaa
Author: Oskari Saarenmaa, edited a bit by me
Bug: #14150
Discussion: <20160519123338.12513.20271@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Backpatch: 9.5, where ON CONFLICT was introduced
2016-08-17 17:03:36 -07:00
Alvaro Herrera 533e9c6b06 Avoid serializability errors when locking a tuple with a committed update
When key-share locking a tuple that has been not-key-updated, and the
update is a committed transaction, in some cases we raised
serializability errors:
    ERROR:  could not serialize access due to concurrent update

Because the key-share doesn't conflict with the update, the error is
unnecessary and inconsistent with the case that the update hasn't
committed yet.  This causes problems for some usage patterns, even if it
can be claimed that it's sufficient to retry the aborted transaction:
given a steady stream of updating transactions and a long locking
transaction, the long transaction can be starved indefinitely despite
multiple retries.

To fix, we recognize that HeapTupleSatisfiesUpdate can return
HeapTupleUpdated when an updating transaction has committed, and that we
need to deal with that case exactly as if it were a non-committed
update: verify whether the two operations conflict, and if not, carry on
normally.  If they do conflict, however, there is a difference: in the
HeapTupleBeingUpdated case we can just sleep until the concurrent
transaction is gone, while in the HeapTupleUpdated case this is not
possible and we must raise an error instead.

Per trouble report from Olivier Dony.

In addition to a couple of test cases that verify the changed behavior,
I added a test case to verify the behavior that remains unchanged,
namely that errors are raised when a update that modifies the key is
used.  That must still generate serializability errors.  One
pre-existing test case changes behavior; per discussion, the new
behavior is actually the desired one.

Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/560AA479.4080807@odoo.com
  https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20151014164844.3019.25750@wrigleys.postgresql.org

Backpatch to 9.3, where the problem appeared.
2016-07-15 14:17:20 -04:00
Kevin Grittner fcff8a5751 Detect SSI conflicts before reporting constraint violations
While prior to this patch the user-visible effect on the database
of any set of successfully committed serializable transactions was
always consistent with some one-at-a-time order of execution of
those transactions, the presence of declarative constraints could
allow errors to occur which were not possible in any such ordering,
and developers had no good workarounds to prevent user-facing
errors where they were not necessary or desired.  This patch adds
a check for serialization failure ahead of duplicate key checking
so that if a developer explicitly (redundantly) checks for the
pre-existing value they will get the desired serialization failure
where the problem is caused by a concurrent serializable
transaction; otherwise they will get a duplicate key error.

While it would be better if the reads performed by the constraints
could count as part of the work of the transaction for
serialization failure checking, and we will hopefully get there
some day, this patch allows a clean and reliable way for developers
to work around the issue.  In many cases existing code will already
be doing the right thing for this to "just work".

Author: Thomas Munro, with minor editing of docs by me
Reviewed-by: Marko Tiikkaja, Kevin Grittner
2016-04-07 11:12:35 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera c9578135f7 Add isolationtester spec for old heapam.c bug
In 0e5680f473, I fixed a bug in heapam that caused spurious deadlocks
when multiple updates concurrently attempted to modify the old version
of an updated tuple whose new version was key-share locked.  I proposed
an isolationtester spec file that reproduced the bug, but back then
isolationtester wasn't mature enough to be able to run it.  Now that
38f8bdcac4 is in the tree, we can have this spec file too.

Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20141212205254.GC1768%40alvh.no-ip.org
2016-02-26 17:11:15 -03:00
Robert Haas 4c9864b9b4 Add some isolation tests for deadlock detection and resolution.
Previously, we had no test coverage for the deadlock detector.
2016-02-11 08:38:09 -05:00
Tom Lane 5884b92a84 Fix errors in commit a04bb65f70.
Not a lot of commentary needed here really.
2015-09-30 23:37:26 -04:00
Tom Lane 6a1e14c62b Temporarily(?) remove BRIN isolation test.
Commit 2834855cb added a not-very-carefully-thought-out isolation test
to check a BRIN index bug fix.  The test depended on the availability
of the pageinspect contrib module, which meant it did not work in
several common testing scenarios such as "make check-world".  It's not
clear whether we want a core test depending on a contrib module like
that, but in any case, failing to deal with the possibility that the
module isn't present in the installation-under-test is not acceptable.

Remove that test pending some better solution.
2015-08-10 10:22:37 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera 2834855cb9 Fix BRIN to use SnapshotAny during summarization
For correctness of summarization results, it is critical that the
snapshot used during the summarization scan is able to see all tuples
that are live to all transactions -- including tuples inserted or
deleted by in-progress transactions.  Otherwise, it would be possible
for a transaction to insert a tuple, then idle for a long time while a
concurrent transaction executes summarization of the range: this would
result in the inserted value not being considered in the summary.
Previously we were trying to use a MVCC snapshot in conjunction with
adding a "placeholder" tuple in the index: the snapshot would see all
committed tuples, and the placeholder tuple would catch insertions by
any new inserters.  The hole is that prior insertions by transactions
that are still in progress by the time the MVCC snapshot was taken were
ignored.

Kevin Grittner reported this as a bogus error message during vacuum with
default transaction isolation mode set to repeatable read (because the
error report mentioned a function name not being invoked during), but
the problem is larger than that.

To fix, tweak IndexBuildHeapRangeScan to have a new mode that behaves
the way we need using SnapshotAny visibility rules.  This change
simplifies the BRIN code a bit, mainly by removing large comments that
were mistaken.  Instead, rely on the SnapshotAny semantics to provide
what it needs.  (The business about a placeholder tuple needs to remain:
that covers the case that a transaction inserts a a tuple in a page that
summarization already scanned.)

Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150731175700.GX2441@postgresql.org

In passing, remove a couple of unused declarations from brin.h and
reword a comment to be proper English.  This part submitted by Kevin
Grittner.

Backpatch to 9.5, where BRIN was introduced.
2015-08-05 16:20:50 -03:00
Andres Freund 168d5805e4 Add support for INSERT ... ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING/UPDATE.
The newly added ON CONFLICT clause allows to specify an alternative to
raising a unique or exclusion constraint violation error when inserting.
ON CONFLICT refers to constraints that can either be specified using a
inference clause (by specifying the columns of a unique constraint) or
by naming a unique or exclusion constraint.  DO NOTHING avoids the
constraint violation, without touching the pre-existing row.  DO UPDATE
SET ... [WHERE ...] updates the pre-existing tuple, and has access to
both the tuple proposed for insertion and the existing tuple; the
optional WHERE clause can be used to prevent an update from being
executed.  The UPDATE SET and WHERE clauses have access to the tuple
proposed for insertion using the "magic" EXCLUDED alias, and to the
pre-existing tuple using the table name or its alias.

This feature is often referred to as upsert.

This is implemented using a new infrastructure called "speculative
insertion". It is an optimistic variant of regular insertion that first
does a pre-check for existing tuples and then attempts an insert.  If a
violating tuple was inserted concurrently, the speculatively inserted
tuple is deleted and a new attempt is made.  If the pre-check finds a
matching tuple the alternative DO NOTHING or DO UPDATE action is taken.
If the insertion succeeds without detecting a conflict, the tuple is
deemed inserted.

To handle the possible ambiguity between the excluded alias and a table
named excluded, and for convenience with long relation names, INSERT
INTO now can alias its target table.

Bumps catversion as stored rules change.

Author: Peter Geoghegan, with significant contributions from Heikki
    Linnakangas and Andres Freund. Testing infrastructure by Jeff Janes.
Reviewed-By: Heikki Linnakangas, Andres Freund, Robert Haas, Simon Riggs,
    Dean Rasheed, Stephen Frost and many others.
2015-05-08 05:43:10 +02:00
Simon Riggs 0ef0396ae1 Reduce lock levels of some trigger DDL and add FKs
Reduce lock levels to ShareRowExclusive for the following SQL
 CREATE TRIGGER (but not DROP or ALTER)
 ALTER TABLE ENABLE TRIGGER
 ALTER TABLE DISABLE TRIGGER
 ALTER TABLE … ADD CONSTRAINT FOREIGN KEY

Original work by Simon Riggs, extracted and refreshed by Andreas Karlsson
New test cases added by Andreas Karlsson
Reviewed by Noah Misch, Andres Freund, Michael Paquier and Simon Riggs
2015-04-05 11:37:08 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera d5e3d1e969 Fix thinko in lock mode enum
Commit 0e5680f473 contained a thinko
mixing LOCKMODE with LockTupleMode.  This caused misbehavior in the case
where a tuple is marked with a multixact with at most a FOR SHARE lock,
and another transaction tries to acquire a FOR NO KEY EXCLUSIVE lock;
this case should block but doesn't.

Include a new isolation tester spec file to explicitely try all the
tuple lock combinations; without the fix it shows the problem:

    starting permutation: s1_begin s1_lcksvpt s1_tuplock2 s2_tuplock3 s1_commit
    step s1_begin: BEGIN;
    step s1_lcksvpt: SELECT * FROM multixact_conflict FOR KEY SHARE; SAVEPOINT foo;
    a

    1
    step s1_tuplock2: SELECT * FROM multixact_conflict FOR SHARE;
    a

    1
    step s2_tuplock3: SELECT * FROM multixact_conflict FOR NO KEY UPDATE;
    a

    1
    step s1_commit: COMMIT;

With the fixed code, step s2_tuplock3 blocks until session 1 commits,
which is the correct behavior.

All other cases behave correctly.

Backpatch to 9.3, like the commit that introduced the problem.
2015-01-04 15:48:29 -03:00
Alvaro Herrera df630b0dd5 Implement SKIP LOCKED for row-level locks
This clause changes the behavior of SELECT locking clauses in the
presence of locked rows: instead of causing a process to block waiting
for the locks held by other processes (or raise an error, with NOWAIT),
SKIP LOCKED makes the new reader skip over such rows.  While this is not
appropriate behavior for general purposes, there are some cases in which
it is useful, such as queue-like tables.

Catalog version bumped because this patch changes the representation of
stored rules.

Reviewed by Craig Ringer (based on a previous attempt at an
implementation by Simon Riggs, who also provided input on the syntax
used in the current patch), David Rowley, and Álvaro Herrera.

Author: Thomas Munro
2014-10-07 17:23:34 -03:00
Alvaro Herrera 1c9701cfe5 Fix FOR UPDATE NOWAIT on updated tuple chains
If SELECT FOR UPDATE NOWAIT tries to lock a tuple that is concurrently
being updated, it might fail to honor its NOWAIT specification and block
instead of raising an error.

Fix by adding a no-wait flag to EvalPlanQualFetch which it can pass down
to heap_lock_tuple; also use it in EvalPlanQualFetch itself to avoid
blocking while waiting for a concurrent transaction.

Authors: Craig Ringer and Thomas Munro, tweaked by Álvaro
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/51FB6703.9090801@2ndquadrant.com

Per Thomas Munro in the course of his SKIP LOCKED feature submission,
who also provided one of the isolation test specs.

Backpatch to 9.4, because that's as far back as it applies without
conflicts (although the bug goes all the way back).  To that branch also
backpatch Thomas Munro's new NOWAIT test cases, committed in master by
Heikki as commit 9ee16b49f0 .
2014-08-27 19:15:18 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas 9ee16b49f0 Add regression tests for SELECT FOR UPDATE/SHARE NOWAIT.
Thomas Munro
2014-08-25 20:14:43 +03:00
Simon Riggs e5550d5fec Reduce lock levels of some ALTER TABLE cmds
VALIDATE CONSTRAINT

CLUSTER ON
SET WITHOUT CLUSTER

ALTER COLUMN SET STATISTICS
ALTER COLUMN SET ()
ALTER COLUMN RESET ()

All other sub-commands use AccessExclusiveLock

Simon Riggs and Noah Misch

Reviews by Robert Haas and Andres Freund
2014-04-06 11:13:43 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera 11ac4c73cb Don't ignore tuple locks propagated by our updates
If a tuple was locked by transaction A, and transaction B updated it,
the new version of the tuple created by B would be locked by A, yet
visible only to B; due to an oversight in HeapTupleSatisfiesUpdate, the
lock held by A wouldn't get checked if transaction B later deleted (or
key-updated) the new version of the tuple.  This might cause referential
integrity checks to give false positives (that is, allow deletes that
should have been rejected).

This is an easy oversight to have made, because prior to improved tuple
locks in commit 0ac5ad5134 it wasn't possible to have tuples created by
our own transaction that were also locked by remote transactions, and so
locks weren't even considered in that code path.

It is recommended that foreign keys be rechecked manually in bulk after
installing this update, in case some referenced rows are missing with
some referencing row remaining.

Per bug reported by Daniel Wood in
CAPweHKe5QQ1747X2c0tA=5zf4YnS2xcvGf13Opd-1Mq24rF1cQ@mail.gmail.com
2013-12-18 13:45:51 -03:00
Alvaro Herrera 312bde3d40 Fix improper abort during update chain locking
In 247c76a989, I added some code to do fine-grained checking of
MultiXact status of locking/updating transactions when traversing an
update chain.  There was a thinko in that patch which would have the
traversing abort, that is return HeapTupleUpdated, when the other
transaction is a committed lock-only.  In this case we should ignore it
and return success instead.  Of course, in the case where there is a
committed update, HeapTupleUpdated is the correct return value.

A user-visible symptom of this bug is that in REPEATABLE READ and
SERIALIZABLE transaction isolation modes spurious serializability errors
can occur:
  ERROR:  could not serialize access due to concurrent update

In order for this to happen, there needs to be a tuple that's key-share-
locked and also updated, and the update must abort; a subsequent
transaction trying to acquire a new lock on that tuple would abort with
the above error.  The reason is that the initial FOR KEY SHARE is seen
as committed by the new locking transaction, which triggers this bug.
(If the UPDATE commits, then the serialization error is correctly
reported.)

When running a query in READ COMMITTED mode, what happens is that the
locking is aborted by the HeapTupleUpdated return value, then
EvalPlanQual fetches the newest version of the tuple, which is then the
only version that gets locked.  (The second time the tuple is checked
there is no misbehavior on the committed lock-only, because it's not
checked by the code that traverses update chains; so no bug.) Only the
newest version of the tuple is locked, not older ones, but this is
harmless.

The isolation test added by this commit illustrates the desired
behavior, including the proper serialization errors that get thrown.

Backpatch to 9.3.
2013-12-05 17:47:51 -03:00
Alvaro Herrera 1310d4cab2 add multixact-no-deadlock to schedule 2013-10-04 15:52:58 -03:00
Tom Lane d43837d030 Add lock_timeout configuration parameter.
This GUC allows limiting the time spent waiting to acquire any one
heavyweight lock.

In support of this, improve the recently-added timeout infrastructure
to permit efficiently enabling or disabling multiple timeouts at once.
That reduces the performance hit from turning on lock_timeout, though
it's still not zero.

Zoltán Böszörményi, reviewed by Tom Lane,
Stephen Frost, and Hari Babu
2013-03-16 23:22:57 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera 0ac5ad5134 Improve concurrency of foreign key locking
This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE".  These don't block each
other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
FOR UPDATE".  UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.

Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
point of this patch.

The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
be stored alongside its Xid.  Also, multixacts now need to persist
across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
only tuple locks, but also tuple updates.  This means we need more
careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
can be removed.  pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
servers.

Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
available from the tuple header.  This is considered acceptable, because
the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.

Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
of the tuple there exist.)

With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
foreign key rules should be much reduced.

As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.

Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
overall behavior is sane.  There's probably room for several more tests.

There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it.  Original idea for the
patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.

This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
important start at the following message-ids:
	AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com
	1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org
	1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org
	1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org
	1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org
	4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov
	4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
2013-01-23 12:04:59 -03:00
Simon Riggs 160984c8c8 Isolation test for DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY
for recent concurrent changes.

Abhijit Menon-Sen
2012-10-18 19:41:40 +01:00
Simon Riggs 5ad72cee7e Revert tests for drop index concurrently. 2012-10-18 15:27:12 +01:00
Simon Riggs 4e206744dc Add isolation tests for DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY.
Backpatch to 9.2 to ensure bugs are fixed.

Abhijit Menon-Sen
2012-10-18 13:37:09 +01:00
Kevin Grittner cdf91edba9 Fix serializable mode with index-only scans.
Serializable Snapshot Isolation used for serializable transactions
depends on acquiring SIRead locks on all heap relation tuples which
are used to generate the query result, so that a later delete or
update of any of the tuples can flag a read-write conflict between
transactions.  This is normally handled in heapam.c, with tuple level
locking.  Since an index-only scan avoids heap access in many cases,
building the result from the index tuple, the necessary predicate
locks were not being acquired for all tuples in an index-only scan.

To prevent problems with tuple IDs which are vacuumed and re-used
while the transaction still matters, the xmin of the tuple is part of
the tag for the tuple lock.  Since xmin is not available to the
index-only scan for result rows generated from the index tuples, it
is not possible to acquire a tuple-level predicate lock in such
cases, in spite of having the tid.  If we went to the heap to get the
xmin value, it would no longer be an index-only scan.  Rather than
prohibit index-only scans under serializable transaction isolation,
we acquire an SIRead lock on the page containing the tuple, when it
was not necessary to visit the heap for other reasons.

Backpatch to 9.2.

Kevin Grittner and Tom Lane
2012-09-04 21:13:11 -05:00
Andrew Dunstan ae55d9fbe3 Remove prepared transactions from main isolation test schedule.
There is no point in running this test when prepared transactions are disabled,
which is the default. New make targets that include the test are provided. This
will save some useless waste of cycles on buildfarm machines.

Backpatch to 9.1 where these tests were introduced.
2012-07-20 15:51:40 -04:00
Tom Lane 759d9d6769 Add simple tests of EvalPlanQual using the isolationtester infrastructure.
Much more could be done here, but at least now we have *some* automated
test coverage of that mechanism.  In particular this tests the writable-CTE
case reported by Phil Sorber.

In passing, remove isolationtester's arbitrary restriction on the number of
steps in a permutation list.  I used this so that a single spec file could
be used to run several related test scenarios, but there are other possible
reasons to want a step series that's not exactly a permutation.  Improve
documentation and fix a couple other nits as well.
2012-01-28 17:55:08 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera 28190bacfd Add expected isolationtester output when prepared xacts are disabled
This was deemed unnecessary initially but in later discussion it was
agreed otherwise.

Original file from Kevin Grittner, allegedly from Dan Ports.
I had to clean up whitespace a bit per changes from Heikki.
2011-08-25 17:44:56 -03:00
Heikki Linnakangas af35737313 Add an SSI regression test that tests all interesting permutations in the
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
2011-08-18 17:09:58 +03:00
Alvaro Herrera 846af54dd5 Add support for blocked commands in isolationtester
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
2011-07-12 17:24:17 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas dafaa3efb7 Implement genuine serializable isolation level.
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
2011-02-08 00:09:08 +02:00