In external sort's merge phase, we maintain a binary heap holding the next
tuple from each input tape. On each step, the topmost tuple is returned,
and replaced with the next tuple from the same tape. We were doing the
replacement by deleting the top node in one operation, and inserting the
next tuple after that. However, you can do a "replace-top" operation more
efficiently, in one "sift-up". A deletion will always walk the heap from
top to bottom, but in a replacement, we can stop as soon as we find the
right place for the new tuple. This is particularly helpful, if the tapes
are not in completely random order, so that the next tuple from a tape is
likely to land near the top of the heap.
Peter Geoghegan, reviewed by Claudio Freire, with some editing by me.
Discussion: <CAM3SWZRhBhiknTF_=NjDSnNZ11hx=U_SEYwbc5vd=x7M4mMiCw@mail.gmail.com>
Negative availMemLessRefund would be problematic. It's not entirely
clear whether the case can be hit in the code as it stands, but this
seems like good future-proofing in any case. While we're at it,
insist that the value be not merely positive but not tiny, so as to
avoid doing a lot of repalloc work for little gain.
Peter Geoghegan
Discussion: <CAM3SWZRVkuUB68DbAkgw=532gW0f+fofKueAMsY7hVYi68MuYQ@mail.gmail.com>
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Due to an error in the abbreviated key abort logic, the most recently
processed SortTuple could be incorrectly marked NULL, resulting in an
incorrect final sort order.
In the worst case, this could result in a corrupt btree index, which
would need to be rebuild using REINDEX. However, abbrevation doesn't
abort very often, not all data types use it, and only one tuple would
end up in the wrong place, so the practical impact of this mistake may
be somewhat limited.
Report and patch by Peter Geoghegan.
Otherwise, when we abandon incremental memory accounting and use
batch allocation for the final merge pass, we might crash. This
has been broken since 0011c0091e.
Peter Geoghegan, tested by Noah Misch
Now indexes (but only B-tree for now) can contain "extra" column(s) which
doesn't participate in index structure, they are just stored in leaf
tuples. It allows to use index only scan by using single index instead
of two or more indexes.
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with minor editorializing by me
Reviewers: David Rowley, Peter Geoghegan, Jeff Janes
We still use replacement selection for the first run of the sort only
and only when the number of tuples is relatively small. Otherwise,
the first run, and subsequent runs in all cases, are produced using
quicksort. This tends to be faster except perhaps for very small
amounts of working memory.
Peter Geoghegan, reviewed by Tomas Vondra, Jeff Janes, Mithun Cy,
Greg Stark, and me.
I'm committing these changes separately so that it's clear what is
Peter's original work versus what I changed. This is a followup to
commit 0011c0091e, and these changes
are all by me.
Introduce a new memory context which stores tuple data, and reset it
at the end of each merge pass; this helps avoid memory fragmentation
and, consequently, overallocation. Also, for the final merge patch,
eliminate memory context chunk header overhead entirely by allocating
all of the memory used for buffering tuples during the merge in a
single chunk. Since this modestly increases the number of tuples we
can store, grow the memtuples array a bit so that we're less likely to
run short of slots there.
Peter Geoghegan. Review and testing of patches in this series by
Jeff Janes, Greg Stark, Mithun Cy, and me.
When processing ordered aggregates following a sort that could make use
of the abbreviated key optimization, only call the equality operator to
compare successive pairs of tuples when their abbreviated keys were not
equal.
Peter Geoghegan, reviewd by Andreas Karlsson and by me.
This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
So far we have worked around the fact that some very old compilers do
not support 'inline' functions by only using inline functions
conditionally (or not at all). Since such compilers are very rare by
now, we have decided to rely on inline functions from 9.6 onwards.
To avoid breaking these old compilers inline is defined away when not
supported. That'll cause "function x defined but not used" type of
warnings, but since nobody develops on such compilers anymore that's
ok.
This change in policy will allow us to more easily employ inline
functions.
I chose to remove code previously conditional on PG_USE_INLINE as it
seemed confusing to have code dependent on a define that's always
defined.
Blacklisting of compilers, like in c53f73879f, now has to be done
differently. A platform template can define PG_FORCE_DISABLE_INLINE to
force inline to be defined empty.
Discussion: 20150701161447.GB30708@awork2.anarazel.de
The tuplesort/tuplestore memory management logic assumed that the chunk
allocation overhead for its memtuples array could not increase when
increasing the array size. This is and always was true for tuplesort,
but we (I, I think) blindly copied that logic into tuplestore.c without
noticing that the assumption failed to hold for the much smaller array
elements used by tuplestore. Given rather small work_mem, this could
result in an improper complaint about "unexpected out-of-memory situation",
as reported by Brent DeSpain in bug #13530.
The easiest way to fix this is just to increase tuplestore's initial
array size so that the assumption holds. Rather than relying on magic
constants, though, let's export a #define from aset.c that represents
the safe allocation threshold, and make tuplestore's calculation depend
on that.
Do the same in tuplesort.c to keep the logic looking parallel, even though
tuplesort.c isn't actually at risk at present. This will keep us from
breaking it if we ever muck with the allocation parameters in aset.c.
Back-patch to all supported versions. The error message doesn't occur
pre-9.3, not so much because the problem can't happen as because the
pre-9.3 tuplestore code neglected to check for it. (The chance of
trouble is a great deal larger as of 9.3, though, due to changes in the
array-size-increasing strategy.) However, allowing LACKMEM() to become
true unexpectedly could still result in less-than-desirable behavior,
so let's patch it all the way back.
It's standard for quicksort implementations, after having partitioned the
input into two subgroups, to recurse to process the smaller partition and
then handle the larger partition by iterating. This method guarantees
that no more than log2(N) levels of recursion can be needed. However,
Bentley and McIlroy argued that checking to see which partition is smaller
isn't worth the cycles, and so their code doesn't do that but just always
recurses on the left partition. In most cases that's fine; but with
worst-case input we might need O(N) levels of recursion, and that means
that qsort could be driven to stack overflow. Such an overflow seems to
be the only explanation for today's report from Yiqing Jin of a SIGSEGV
in med3_tuple while creating an index of a couple billion entries with a
very large maintenance_work_mem setting. Therefore, let's spend the few
additional cycles and lines of code needed to choose the smaller partition
for recursion.
Also, fix up the qsort code so that it properly uses size_t not int for
some intermediate values representing numbers of items. This would only
be a live risk when sorting more than INT_MAX bytes (in qsort/qsort_arg)
or tuples (in qsort_tuple), which I believe would never happen with any
caller in the current core code --- but perhaps it could happen with
call sites in third-party modules? In any case, this is trouble waiting
to happen, and the corrected code is probably if anything shorter and
faster than before, since it removes sign-extension steps that had to
happen when converting between int and size_t.
In passing, move a couple of CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS() calls so that it's
not necessary to preserve the value of "r" across them, and prettify
the output of gen_qsort_tuple.pl a little.
Back-patch to all supported branches. The odds of hitting this issue
are probably higher in 9.4 and up than before, due to the new ability
to allocate sort workspaces exceeding 1GB, but there's no good reason
to believe that it's impossible to crash older branches this way.
Commit 5cefbf5a6c introduced an
assumption that this field would always be non-NULL when doing a merge
pass, but that's not true. Without this fix, you can crash the server
by building a hash index that is sufficiently large relative to
maintenance_work_mem, or by triggering a large datum sort.
Commit 5ea86e6e65 changed the comments
for that field to say that it would be set in all cases except for the
hash index case, but that wasn't (and still isn't) true.
The datum-sort failure was spotted by Tomas Vondra; initial analysis
of that failure was by Peter Geoghegan. The remaining issues were
spotted by me during review of the surrounding code, and the patch is
all my fault.
While building error messages to return to the user,
BuildIndexValueDescription, ExecBuildSlotValueDescription and
ri_ReportViolation would happily include the entire key or entire row in
the result returned to the user, even if the user didn't have access to
view all of the columns being included.
Instead, include only those columns which the user is providing or which
the user has select rights on. If the user does not have any rights
to view the table or any of the columns involved then no detail is
provided and a NULL value is returned from BuildIndexValueDescription
and ExecBuildSlotValueDescription. Note that, for key cases, the user
must have access to all of the columns for the key to be shown; a
partial key will not be returned.
Further, in master only, do not return any data for cases where row
security is enabled on the relation and row security should be applied
for the user. This required a bit of refactoring and moving of things
around related to RLS- note the addition of utils/misc/rls.c.
Back-patch all the way, as column-level privileges are now in all
supported versions.
This has been assigned CVE-2014-8161, but since the issue and the patch
have already been publicized on pgsql-hackers, there's no point in trying
to hide this commit.
When we write tuples out to disk and read them back in, the abbreviated
keys become non-abbreviated, because the readtup routines don't know
anything about abbreviation. But without this fix, the rest of the
code still thinks the abbreviation-aware compartor should be used,
so chaos ensues.
Report by Andrew Gierth; patch by Peter Geoghegan.
This commit extends the SortSupport infrastructure to allow operator
classes the option to provide abbreviated representations of Datums;
in the case of text, we abbreviate by taking the first few characters
of the strxfrm() blob. If the abbreviated comparison is insufficent
to resolve the comparison, we fall back on the normal comparator.
This can be much faster than the old way of doing sorting if the
first few bytes of the string are usually sufficient to resolve the
comparison.
There is the potential for a performance regression if all of the
strings to be sorted are identical for the first 8+ characters and
differ only in later positions; therefore, the SortSupport machinery
now provides an infrastructure to abort the use of abbreviation if
it appears that abbreviation is producing comparatively few distinct
keys. HyperLogLog, a streaming cardinality estimator, is included in
this commit and used to make that determination for text.
Peter Geoghegan, reviewed by me.
xlog.c is huge, this makes it a little bit smaller, which is nice. Functions
related to putting together the WAL record are in xloginsert.c, and the
lower level stuff for managing WAL buffers and such are in xlog.c.
Also move the definition of XLogRecord to a separate header file. This
causes churn in the #includes of all the files that write WAL records, and
redo routines, but it avoids pulling in xlog.h into most places.
Reviewed by Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera, Andres Freund and Amit Kapila.
This could be useful for datatypes like text, where we might want
to optimize for some collations but not others. However, this patch
doesn't introduce any new sortsupport functions that work this way;
it merely revises the code so that future patches may do so.
Patch by me. Review by Peter Geoghegan.
The previous code, perhaps out of concern for avoid memory leaks, formed
the tuple in one memory context and then copied it to another memory
context. However, this doesn't appear to be necessary, since
index_form_tuple and the functions it calls take precautions against
leaking memory. In my testing, building the tuple directly inside the
sort context shaves several percent off the index build time.
Rearrange things so we do that.
Patch by me. Review by Amit Kapila, Tom Lane, Andres Freund.
We should report the errno when we get a failure from functions like
BufFileWrite. "ERROR: write failed" is unreasonably taciturn for a
case that's well within the realm of possibility; I've seen it a
couple times in the buildfarm recently, in situations that were
probably out-of-disk-space, but it'd be good to see the errno
to confirm it.
I think this code was originally written without assuming that
the buffile.c functions would return useful errno; but most other
callers *are* assuming that, and a quick look at the buffile code
gives no reason to suppose otherwise.
Also, a couple of the old messages were phrased on the assumption
that a short read might indicate a logic bug in tuplestore itself;
but that code's pretty well tested by now, so a filesystem-level
problem seems much more likely.
Repositioning the tuplestore seek pointer in window_gettupleslot() turns
out to be a very significant expense when the window frame is sizable and
the frame end can move. To fix, introduce a tuplestore function for
skipping an arbitrary number of tuples in one call, parallel to the one we
introduced for tuplesort objects in commit 8d65da1f. This reduces the cost
of window_gettupleslot() to O(1) if the tuplestore has not spilled to disk.
As in the previous commit, I didn't try to do any real optimization of
tuplestore_skiptuples for the case where the tuplestore has spilled to
disk. There is probably no practical way to get the cost to less than O(N)
anyway, but perhaps someone can think of something later.
Also fix PersistHoldablePortal() to make use of this API now that we have
it.
Based on a suggestion by Dean Rasheed, though this turns out not to look
much like his patch.
This patch introduces generic support for ordered-set and hypothetical-set
aggregate functions, as well as implementations of the instances defined in
SQL:2008 (percentile_cont(), percentile_disc(), rank(), dense_rank(),
percent_rank(), cume_dist()). We also added mode() though it is not in the
spec, as well as versions of percentile_cont() and percentile_disc() that
can compute multiple percentile values in one pass over the data.
Unlike the original submission, this patch puts full control of the sorting
process in the hands of the aggregate's support functions. To allow the
support functions to find out how they're supposed to sort, a new API
function AggGetAggref() is added to nodeAgg.c. This allows retrieval of
the aggregate call's Aggref node, which may have other uses beyond the
immediate need. There is also support for ordered-set aggregates to
install cleanup callback functions, so that they can be sure that
infrastructure such as tuplesort objects gets cleaned up.
In passing, make some fixes in the recently-added support for variadic
aggregates, and make some editorial adjustments in the recent FILTER
additions for aggregates. Also, simplify use of IsBinaryCoercible() by
allowing it to succeed whenever the target type is ANY or ANYELEMENT.
It was inconsistent that it dealt with other polymorphic target types
but not these.
Atri Sharma and Andrew Gierth; reviewed by Pavel Stehule and Vik Fearing,
and rather heavily editorialized upon by Tom Lane
In tuplesort.c:inittapes(), we calculate tapeSpace by first figuring
out how many 'tapes' we can use (maxTapes) and then multiplying the
result by the tape buffer overhead for each. Unfortunately, when
we are on a system with an 8-byte long, we allow work_mem to be
larger than 2GB and that allows maxTapes to be large enough that the
32bit arithmetic can overflow when multiplied against the buffer
overhead.
When this overflow happens, we end up adding the overflow to the
amount of space available, causing the amount of memory allocated to
be larger than work_mem.
Note that to reach this point, you have to set work mem to at least
24GB and be sorting a set which is at least that size. Given that a
user who can set work_mem to 24GB could also set it even higher, if
they were looking to run the system out of memory, this isn't
considered a security issue.
This overflow risk was found by the Coverity scanner.
Back-patch to all supported branches, as this issue has existed
since before 8.4.
Heikki Linnakangas
Tom Lane
Robert Haas
Bruce Momjian
Teodor Sigaev
Andres Freund
Stephen Frost
Peter Eisentraut