We didn't have any real user documentation about how index-only scans
work or how to design indexes to exploit them. Remedy that.
Per gripe from David Johnston.
This lets you examine the visibility map as well as page-level
visibility information. I initially wrote it as a debugging aid,
but was encouraged to polish it for commit.
Patch by me, reviewed by Masahiko Sawada.
Discussion: 56D77803.6080503@BlueTreble.com
The new bit indicates whether every tuple on the page is already frozen.
It is cleared only when the all-visible bit is cleared, and it can be
set only when we vacuum a page and find that every tuple on that page is
both visible to every transaction and in no need of any future
vacuuming.
A future commit will use this new bit to optimize away full-table scans
that would otherwise be triggered by XID wraparound considerations. A
page which is merely all-visible must still be scanned in that case, but
a page which is all-frozen need not be. This commit does not attempt
that optimization, although that optimization is the goal here. It
seems better to get the basic infrastructure in place first.
Per discussion, it's very desirable for pg_upgrade to automatically
migrate existing VM forks from the old format to the new format. That,
too, will be handled in a follow-on patch.
Masahiko Sawada, reviewed by Kyotaro Horiguchi, Fujii Masao, Amit
Kapila, Simon Riggs, Andres Freund, and others, and substantially
revised by me.
Previously it was documented that the details on HeapTupleHeaderData
struct could be found in htup.h. This is not correct because it's now
defined in htup_details.h.
Back-patch to 9.3 where the definition of HeapTupleHeaderData struct
was moved from htup.h to htup_details.h.
Michael Paquier
This patch introduces the ability for complex datatypes to have an
in-memory representation that is different from their on-disk format.
On-disk formats are typically optimized for minimal size, and in any case
they can't contain pointers, so they are often not well-suited for
computation. Now a datatype can invent an "expanded" in-memory format
that is better suited for its operations, and then pass that around among
the C functions that operate on the datatype. There are also provisions
(rudimentary as yet) to allow an expanded object to be modified in-place
under suitable conditions, so that operations like assignment to an element
of an array need not involve copying the entire array.
The initial application for this feature is arrays, but it is not hard
to foresee using it for other container types like JSON, XML and hstore.
I have hopes that it will be useful to PostGIS as well.
In this initial implementation, a few heuristics have been hard-wired
into plpgsql to improve performance for arrays that are stored in
plpgsql variables. We would like to generalize those hacks so that
other datatypes can obtain similar improvements, but figuring out some
appropriate APIs is left as a task for future work. (The heuristics
themselves are probably not optimal yet, either, as they sometimes
force expansion of arrays that would be better left alone.)
Preliminary performance testing shows impressive speed gains for plpgsql
functions that do element-by-element access or update of large arrays.
There are other cases that get a little slower, as a result of added array
format conversions; but we can hope to improve anything that's annoyingly
bad. In any case most applications should see a net win.
Tom Lane, reviewed by Andres Freund
While working on documentation for expanded arrays, I noticed a number of
details in the TOAST-related documentation that were already inaccurate or
obsolete. This should be fixed independently of whether expanded arrays
get in or not. One issue is that the already existing indirect-pointer
facility was not documented at all. Also, the documentation says that you
only need to use VARSIZE/SET_VARSIZE if you've made your variable-length
type TOAST-aware, but actually we've forced that business on all varlena
types even if they've opted out of TOAST by setting storage = plain.
Wordsmith a few other things too, like an amusingly archaic claim that
there are few 64-bit machines.
I thought about back-patching this, but since all this doco is oriented
to hackers and C-coded extension authors, fixing it in HEAD is probably
good enough.
Transactions can now set their commit timestamp directly as they commit,
or an external transaction commit timestamp can be fed from an outside
system using the new function TransactionTreeSetCommitTsData(). This
data is crash-safe, and truncated at Xid freeze point, same as pg_clog.
This module is disabled by default because it causes a performance hit,
but can be enabled in postgresql.conf requiring only a server restart.
A new test in src/test/modules is included.
Catalog version bumped due to the new subdirectory within PGDATA and a
couple of new SQL functions.
Authors: Álvaro Herrera and Petr Jelínek
Reviewed to varying degrees by Michael Paquier, Andres Freund, Robert
Haas, Amit Kapila, Fujii Masao, Jaime Casanova, Simon Riggs, Steven
Singer, Peter Eisentraut
The initialization fork was added in 9.1, but has not been taken into
consideration in documents of get_raw_page function in pageinspect and
storage layout. This commit fixes those oversights.
get_raw_page can read not only a table but also an index, etc. So it
should be documented that the function can read any relation. This commit
also fixes the document of pageinspect that way.
Back-patch to 9.1 where those oversights existed.
Vik Fearing, review by MauMau
The old name wasn't very descriptive as of actual contents of the
directory, which are historical snapshots in the snapshots/
subdirectory and mappingdata for rewritten tuples in
mappings/. There's been a fair amount of discussion what would be a
good name. I'm settling for pg_logical because it's likely that
further data around logical decoding and replication will need saving
in the future.
Also add the missing entry for the directory into storage.sgml's list
of PGDATA contents.
Bumps catversion as the data directories won't be compatible.
Document that routine vacuuming is now also important for the purpose
of index-only scans; and mention in the section that describes the
visibility map that it is used to implement index-only scans.
Marti Raudsepp, with some changes by me.
A transaction can export a snapshot with pg_export_snapshot(), and then
others can import it with SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT. The data does not
leave the server so there are not security issues. A snapshot can only
be imported while the exporting transaction is still running, and there
are some other restrictions.
I'm not totally convinced that we've covered all the bases for SSI (true
serializable) mode, but it works fine for lesser isolation modes.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja, and rather heavily modified
by Tom Lane
Fix broken test for pre-existing postmaster, caused by wrong code for
appending lines to the lockfile; don't write a failed listen_address
setting into the lockfile; don't arbitrarily change the location of the
data directory in the lockfile compared to previous releases; provide more
consistent and useful definitions of the socket path and listen_address
entries; avoid assuming that pg_ctl has the same DEFAULT_PGSOCKET_DIR as
the postmaster; assorted code style improvements.
The contents of an unlogged table are WAL-logged; thus, they are not
available on standby servers and are truncated whenever the database
system enters recovery. Indexes on unlogged tables are also unlogged.
Unlogged GiST indexes are not currently supported.
This allows us to reliably remove all leftover temporary relation
files on cluster startup without reference to system catalogs or WAL;
therefore, we no longer include temporary relations in XLOG_XACT_COMMIT
and XLOG_XACT_ABORT WAL records.
Since these changes require including a backend ID in each
SharedInvalSmgrMsg, the size of the SharedInvalidationMessage.id
field has been reduced from two bytes to one, and the maximum number
of connections has been reduced from INT_MAX / 4 to 2^23-1. It would
be possible to remove these restrictions by increasing the size of
SharedInvalidationMessage by 4 bytes, but right now that doesn't seem
like a good trade-off.
Review by Jaime Casanova and Tom Lane.
In addition, add support for a "payload" string to be passed along with
each notify event.
This implementation should be significantly more efficient than the old one,
and is also more compatible with Hot Standby usage. There is not yet any
facility for HS slaves to receive notifications generated on the master,
although such a thing is possible in future.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Jeff Davis; also hacked on by me.
of shared or nailed system catalogs. This has two key benefits:
* The new CLUSTER-based VACUUM FULL can be applied safely to all catalogs.
* We no longer have to use an unsafe reindex-in-place approach for reindexing
shared catalogs.
CLUSTER on nailed catalogs now works too, although I left it disabled on
shared catalogs because the resulting pg_index.indisclustered update would
only be visible in one database.
Since reindexing shared system catalogs is now fully transactional and
crash-safe, the former special cases in REINDEX behavior have been removed;
shared catalogs are treated the same as non-shared.
This commit does not do anything about the recently-discussed problem of
deadlocks between VACUUM FULL/CLUSTER on a system catalog and other
concurrent queries; will address that in a separate patch. As a stopgap,
parallel_schedule has been tweaked to run vacuum.sql by itself, to avoid
such failures during the regression tests.
not forced out-of-line unless that is necessary to make the row fit on a
page. Previously, they were forced out-of-line if needed to get the row
down to the default target size (1/4th page).
Kevin Grittner
relation forks. While the file names are not visible to users, for those
that do peek into the data directory, it's nice to have more descriptive
names. Per Greg Stark's suggestion.
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
This allows the use of a ramdrive (either through mount or symlink) for
the temporary file that's written every half second, which should
reduce I/O.
On server shutdown/startup, the file is written to the old location in
the global directory, to preserve data across restarts.
Bump catversion since the $PGDATA directory layout changed.
support for a nonsegmented mode from md.c. Per recent discussions, there
doesn't seem to be much value in a "never segment" option as opposed to
segmenting with a suitably large segment size. So instead provide a
configure-time switch to set the desired segment size in units of gigabytes.
While at it, expose a configure switch for BLCKSZ as well.
Zdenek Kotala
than dividing them into 1GB segments as has been our longtime practice. This
requires working support for large files in the operating system; at least for
the time being, it won't be the default.
Zdenek Kotala
explicitly. This means a TOAST pointer takes 18 bytes instead of 17 --- still
smaller than in 8.2 --- which seems a good tradeoff to ensure we won't have
painted ourselves into a corner if we want to support multiple types of TOAST
pointer later on. Per discussion with Greg Stark.
unpruned XMAX in its header. At the cost of 4 bytes per page, this keeps us
from performing heap_page_prune when there's no chance of pruning anything.
Seems to be necessary per Heikki's preliminary performance testing.
tablespace(s) in which to store temp tables and temporary files. This is a
list to allow spreading the load across multiple tablespaces (a random list
element is chosen each time a temp object is to be created). Temp files are
not stored in per-database pgsql_tmp/ directories anymore, but per-tablespace
directories.
Jaime Casanova and Albert Cervera, with review by Bernd Helmle and Tom Lane.
Bruce Momjian
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Fujii Masao
Alvaro Herrera
Andres Freund
Tatsuo Ishii
Peter Eisentraut
Heikki Linnakangas
Magnus Hagander