SP-GiST's original scheme for avoiding deadlocks during concurrent index
insertions doesn't work, as per report from Hailong Li, and there isn't any
evident way to make it work completely. We could possibly lock individual
inner tuples instead of their whole pages, but preliminary experimentation
suggests that the performance penalty would be huge. Instead, if we fail
to get a buffer lock while descending the tree, just restart the tree
descent altogether. We keep the old tuple positioning rules, though, in
hopes of reducing the number of cases where this can happen.
Teodor Sigaev, somewhat edited by Tom Lane
Checksums are set immediately prior to flush out of shared buffers
and checked when pages are read in again. Hint bit setting will
require full page write when block is dirtied, which causes various
infrastructure changes. Extensive comments, docs and README.
WARNING message thrown if checksum fails on non-all zeroes page;
ERROR thrown but can be disabled with ignore_checksum_failure = on.
Feature enabled by an initdb option, since transition from option off
to option on is long and complex and has not yet been implemented.
Default is not to use checksums.
Checksum used is WAL CRC-32 truncated to 16-bits.
Simon Riggs, Jeff Davis, Greg Smith
Wide input and assistance from many community members. Thank you.
Remove use of PageSetTLI() from all page manipulation functions
and adjust README to indicate change in the way we make changes
to pages. Repurpose those bytes into the pd_checksum field and
explain how that works in comments about page header.
Refactoring ahead of actual feature patch which would make use
of the checksum field, arriving later.
Jeff Davis, with comments and doc changes by Simon Riggs
Direction suggested by Robert Haas; many others providing
review comments.
The heapam XLog functions are used by other modules, not all of which
are interested in the rest of the heapam API. With this, we let them
get just the XLog stuff in which they are interested and not pollute
them with unrelated includes.
Also, since heapam.h no longer requires xlog.h, many files that do
include heapam.h no longer get xlog.h automatically, including a few
headers. This is useful because heapam.h is getting pulled in by
execnodes.h, which is in turn included by a lot of files.
This patch fixes the other major compatibility-breaking limitation of
SPGiST, that it didn't store anything for null values of the indexed
column, and so could not support whole-index scans or "x IS NULL"
tests. The approach is to create a wholly separate search tree for
the null entries, and use fixed "allTheSame" insertion and search
rules when processing this tree, instead of calling the index opclass
methods. This way the opclass methods do not need to worry about
dealing with nulls.
Catversion bump is for pg_am updates as well as the change in on-disk
format of SPGiST indexes; there are some tweaks in SPGiST WAL records
as well.
Heavily rewritten version of a patch by Oleg Bartunov and Teodor Sigaev.
(The original also stored nulls separately, but it reused GIN code to do
so; which required undesirable compromises in the on-disk format, and
would likely lead to bugs due to the GIN code being required to work in
two very different contexts.)
SP-GiST is comparable to GiST in flexibility, but supports non-balanced
partitioned search structures rather than balanced trees. As described at
PGCon 2011, this new indexing structure can beat GiST in both index build
time and query speed for search problems that it is well matched to.
There are a number of areas that could still use improvement, but at this
point the code seems committable.
Teodor Sigaev and Oleg Bartunov, with considerable revisions by Tom Lane
Tom Lane
Simon Riggs
Bruce Momjian
Alvaro Herrera