In some corner cases, it is possible for the BRIN index relation to be
extended by brin_getinsertbuffer but the new page not be used
immediately for anything by its callers; when this happens, the page is
initialized and the FSM is updated (by brin_getinsertbuffer) with the
info about that page, but these actions are not WAL-logged. A later
index insert/update can use the page, but since the page is already
initialized, the initialization itself is not WAL-logged then either.
Replay of this sequence of events causes recovery to fail altogether.
There is a related corner case within brin_getinsertbuffer itself, in
which we extend the relation to put a new index tuple there, but later
find out that we cannot do so, and do not return the buffer; the page
obtained from extension is not even initialized. The resulting page is
lost forever.
To fix, shuffle the code so that initialization is not the
responsibility of brin_getinsertbuffer anymore, in normal cases;
instead, the initialization is done by its callers (brin_doinsert and
brin_doupdate) once they're certain that the page is going to be used.
When either those functions determine that the new page cannot be used,
before bailing out they initialize the page as an empty regular page,
enter it in FSM and WAL-log all this. This way, the page is usable for
future index insertions, and WAL replay doesn't find trying to insert
tuples in pages whose initialization didn't make it to the WAL. The
same strategy is used in brin_getinsertbuffer when it cannot return the
new page.
Additionally, add a new step to vacuuming so that all pages of the index
are scanned; whenever an uninitialized page is found, it is initialized
as empty and WAL-logged. This closes the hole that the relation is
extended but the system crashes before anything is WAL-logged about it.
We also take this opportunity to update the FSM, in case it has gotten
out of date.
Thanks to Heikki Linnakangas for finding the problem that kicked some
additional analysis of BRIN page assignment code.
Backpatch to 9.5, where BRIN was introduced.
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20150723204810.GY5596@postgresql.org
brin_form_tuple calculated an exact tuple size, then palloc'd and
filled just that much. Later, brin_doinsert or brin_doupdate would
MAXALIGN the tuple size and tell PageAddItem that that was the size
of the tuple to insert. If the original tuple size wasn't a multiple
of MAXALIGN, the net result would be that PageAddItem would memcpy
a few more bytes than the palloc request had been for.
AFAICS, this is totally harmless in the real world: the error is a
read overrun not a write overrun, and palloc would certainly have
rounded the request up to a MAXALIGN multiple internally, so there's
no chance of the memcpy fetching off the end of memory. Valgrind,
however, is picky to the byte level not the MAXALIGN level.
Fix it by pushing the MAXALIGN step back to brin_form_tuple. (The other
possible source of tuples in this code, brin_form_placeholder_tuple,
was already producing a MAXALIGN'd result.)
In passing, be a bit more paranoid about internal allocations in
brin_form_tuple.
Use "a" and "an" correctly, mostly in comments. Two error messages were
also fixed (they were just elogs, so no translation work required). Two
function comments in pg_proc.h were also fixed. Etsuro Fujita reported one
of these, but I found a lot more with grep.
Also fix a few other typos spotted while grepping for the a/an typos.
For example, "consists out of ..." -> "consists of ...". Plus a "though"/
"through" mixup reported by Euler Taveira.
Many of these typos were in old code, which would be nice to backpatch to
make future backpatching easier. But much of the code was new, and I didn't
feel like crafting separate patches for each branch. So no backpatching.
... which is the usual convention among AMs, so that pg_filedump and
similar utilities can tell apart pages of different AMs. It was also
the intent of the original code, but I failed to realize that alignment
considerations would move the whole thing to the previous-to-last word
in the page.
The new definition of the associated macro makes surrounding code a bit
leaner, too.
Per note from Heikki at
http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/546A16EF.9070005@vmware.com
Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and
block(s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that
need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up
recovery, etc.
There's a whole new API for building WAL records, replacing the XLogRecData
chains used previously. The new API consists of XLogRegister* functions,
which are called for each buffer and chunk of data that is added to the
record. The new API also gives more control over when a full-page image is
written, by passing flags to the XLogRegisterBuffer function.
This also simplifies the XLogReadBufferForRedo() calls. The function can dig
the relation and block number from the WAL record, so they no longer need to
be passed as arguments.
For the convenience of redo routines, XLogReader now disects each WAL record
after reading it, copying the main data part and the per-block data into
MAXALIGNed buffers. The data chunks are not aligned within the WAL record,
but the redo routines can assume that the pointers returned by XLogRecGet*
functions are. Redo routines are now passed the XLogReaderState, which
contains the record in the already-disected format, instead of the plain
XLogRecord.
The new record format also makes the fixed size XLogRecord header smaller,
by removing the xl_len field. The length of the "main data" portion is now
stored at the end of the WAL record, and there's a separate header after
XLogRecord for it. The alignment padding at the end of XLogRecord is also
removed. This compansates for the fact that the new format would otherwise
be more bulky than the old format.
Reviewed by Andres Freund, Amit Kapila, Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera,
Fujii Masao.
Reported by David Rowley: variadic macros are a problem. Get rid of
them using a trick suggested by Tom Lane: add extra parentheses where
needed. In the future we might decide we don't need the calls at all
and remove them, but it seems appropriate to keep them while this code
is still new.
Also from David Rowley: brininsert() was trying to use a variable before
initializing it. Fix by moving the brin_form_tuple call (which
initializes the variable) to within the locked section.
Reported by Peter Eisentraut: can't use "new" as a struct member name,
because C++ compilers will choke on it, as reported by cpluspluscheck.
BRIN is a new index access method intended to accelerate scans of very
large tables, without the maintenance overhead of btrees or other
traditional indexes. They work by maintaining "summary" data about
block ranges. Bitmap index scans work by reading each summary tuple and
comparing them with the query quals; all pages in the range are returned
in a lossy TID bitmap if the quals are consistent with the values in the
summary tuple, otherwise not. Normal index scans are not supported
because these indexes do not store TIDs.
As new tuples are added into the index, the summary information is
updated (if the block range in which the tuple is added is already
summarized) or not; in the latter case, a subsequent pass of VACUUM or
the brin_summarize_new_values() function will create the summary
information.
For data types with natural 1-D sort orders, the summary info consists
of the maximum and the minimum values of each indexed column within each
page range. This type of operator class we call "Minmax", and we
supply a bunch of them for most data types with B-tree opclasses.
Since the BRIN code is generalized, other approaches are possible for
things such as arrays, geometric types, ranges, etc; even for things
such as enum types we could do something different than minmax with
better results. In this commit I only include minmax.
Catalog version bumped due to new builtin catalog entries.
There's more that could be done here, but this is a good step forwards.
Loosely based on ideas from Simon Riggs; code mostly by Álvaro Herrera,
with contribution by Heikki Linnakangas.
Patch reviewed by: Amit Kapila, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas.
Testing help from Jeff Janes, Erik Rijkers, Emanuel Calvo.
PS:
The research leading to these results has received funding from the
European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under
grant agreement n° 318633.
Alvaro Herrera
Tom Lane
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian