Index-only scans avoid taking a lock on the VM buffer, which would
cause a lot of contention. To be correct, that requires some intricate
assumptions that weren't completely documented in the previous
comment.
Reviewed by Robert Haas.
Move checking for unscannable matviews into ExecOpenScanRelation, which is
a better place for it first because the open relation is already available
(saving a relcache lookup cycle), and second because this eliminates the
problem of telling the difference between rangetable entries that will or
will not be scanned by the query. In particular we can get rid of the
not-terribly-well-thought-out-or-implemented isResultRel field that the
initial matviews patch added to RangeTblEntry.
Also get rid of entirely unnecessary scannability check in the rewriter,
and a bogus decision about whether RefreshMatViewStmt requires a parse-time
snapshot.
catversion bump due to removal of a RangeTblEntry field, which changes
stored rules.
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
In lazy_scan_heap, we could issue bogus warnings about incorrect
information in the visibility map, because we checked the visibility
map bit before locking the heap page, creating a race condition. Fix
by rechecking the visibility map bit before we complain. Rejigger
some related logic so that we rely on the possibly-outdated
all_visible_according_to_vm value as little as possible.
In heap_multi_insert, it's not safe to clear the visibility map bit
before beginning the critical section. The visibility map is not
crash-safe unless we treat clearing the bit as a critical operation.
Specifically, if the transaction were to error out after we set the
bit and before entering the critical section, we could end up writing
the heap page to disk (with the bit cleared) and crashing before the
visibility map page made it to disk. That would be bad. heap_insert
has this correct, but somehow the order of operations got rearranged
when heap_multi_insert was added.
Also, add some more comments to visibilitymap_test, lazy_scan_heap,
and IndexOnlyNext, expounding on concurrency issues.
Per extensive code review by Andres Freund, and further review by Tom
Lane, who also made the original report about the bogus warnings.
In general the data returned by an index-only scan should have the
datatypes originally computed by FormIndexDatum. If the index opclasses
use "storage" datatypes different from their input datatypes, the scan
tuple will not have the same rowtype attributed to the index; but we had
a hard-wired assumption that that was true in nodeIndexonlyscan.c. We'd
already hacked around the issue for the one case where the types are
different in btree indexes (btree name_ops), but this would definitely
come back to bite us if we ever implement index-only scans in GiST.
To fix, require the index AM to explicitly provide the tupdesc for the
tuple it is returning. btree can just pass back the index's tupdesc, but
GiST will have to work harder when and if it supports index-only scans.
I had previously proposed fixing this by allowing the index AM to fill the
scan tuple slot directly; but on reflection that seemed like a module
layering violation, since TupleTableSlots are creatures of the executor.
At least in the btree case, it would also be less efficient, since the
tuple deconstruction work would occur even for rows later found to be
invisible to the scan's snapshot.
Dept. of second thoughts: as long as we've got that tlist hanging around
anyway, we can apply ExecTypeFromTL to it to get a suitable descriptor for
the ScanTupleSlot. This is a nicer solution than the previous one because
it eliminates some hard-wired knowledge about btree name_ops, and because
it avoids the somewhat shaky assumption that we needn't set up the scan
tuple descriptor in EXPLAIN_ONLY mode. It doesn't change what actually
happens at run-time though, and I'm still a bit nervous about that.
This commit changes index-only scans so that data is read directly from the
index tuple without first generating a faux heap tuple. The only immediate
benefit is that indexes on system columns (such as OID) can be used in
index-only scans, but this is necessary infrastructure if we are ever to
support index-only scans on expression indexes. The executor is now ready
for that, though the planner still needs substantial work to recognize
the possibility.
To do this, Vars in index-only plan nodes have to refer to index columns
not heap columns. I introduced a new special varno, INDEX_VAR, to mark
such Vars to avoid confusion. (In passing, this commit renames the two
existing special varnos to OUTER_VAR and INNER_VAR.) This allows
ruleutils.c to handle them with logic similar to what we use for subplan
reference Vars.
Since index-only scans are now fundamentally different from regular
indexscans so far as their expression subtrees are concerned, I also chose
to change them to have their own plan node type (and hence, their own
executor source file).
Bruce Momjian
Jeff Davis
Tom Lane
Kevin Grittner
Robert Haas