Commit Graph

1874 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Peter Eisentraut 90132f62a2 Remove unused variable
The variable became obsolete in commit
68739ba856, but only gcc 4.6 shows the
warning.
2011-06-14 23:00:43 +03:00
Bruce Momjian 6560407c7d Pgindent run before 9.1 beta2. 2011-06-09 14:32:50 -04:00
Tom Lane b7e8feb33e Allow domains over arrays to match ANYARRAY parameters again.
This use-case was broken in commit 529cb267a6
of 2010-10-21, in which I commented "For the moment, we just forbid such
matching.  We might later wish to insert an automatic downcast to the
underlying array type, but such a change should also change matching of
domains to ANYELEMENT for consistency".  We still lack consensus about what
to do with ANYELEMENT; but not matching ANYARRAY is a clear loss of
functionality compared to prior releases, so let's go ahead and make that
happen.  Per complaint from Regina Obe and extensive subsequent discussion.
2011-06-08 12:52:58 -04:00
Tom Lane a914377495 Expose the "*VALUES*" alias that we generate for a stand-alone VALUES list.
We were trying to make that strictly an internal implementation detail,
but it turns out that it's exposed anyway when dumping a view defined
like
	CREATE VIEW test_view AS VALUES (1), (2), (3) ORDER BY 1;
This comes out as
	CREATE VIEW ... ORDER BY "*VALUES*".column1;
which fails to parse when reloading the dump.

Hacking ruleutils.c to suppress the column qualification looks like it'd
be a risky business, so instead promote the RTE alias to full-fledged
usability.

Per bug #6049 from Dylan Adams.  Back-patch to all supported branches.
2011-06-04 15:48:17 -04:00
Tom Lane ea8e42f3a0 Fix failure to check whether a rowtype's component types are sortable.
The existence of a btree opclass accepting composite types caused us to
assume that every composite type is sortable.  This isn't true of course;
we need to check if the column types are all sortable.  There was logic
for this for the case of array comparison (ie, check that the element
type is sortable), but we missed the point for rowtypes.  Per Teodor's
report of an ANALYZE failure for an unsortable composite type.

Rather than just add some more ad-hoc logic for this, I moved knowledge of
the issue into typcache.c.  The typcache will now only report out array_eq,
record_cmp, and friends as usable operators if the array or composite type
will work with those functions.

Unfortunately we don't have enough info to do this for anonymous RECORD
types; in that case, just assume it will work, and take the runtime failure
as before if it doesn't.

This patch might be a candidate for back-patching at some point, but
given the lack of complaints from the field, I'd rather just test it in
HEAD for now.

Note: most of the places touched in this patch will need further work
when we get around to supporting hashing of record types.
2011-06-03 15:39:17 -04:00
Tom Lane 6fc6686b48 Clean up parsing of CREATE TRIGGER's argument list.
Use ColLabel in place of ColId, so that reserved words are accepted as if
they were not reserved.  Also, remove BCONST and XCONST, which were never
documented as allowed.  Allowing those exposes to users an implementation
detail, namely the format in which the lexer outputs such constants, that
seems unwise to expose.

No documentation change needed, since this just makes the code act more
like you'd expect from reading the CREATE TRIGGER man page.

Per complaint from Szymon Guz and subsequent discussion.
2011-05-11 14:43:01 -04:00
Tom Lane 12b7164578 Remove precedence labeling of keywords TRUE, FALSE, UNKNOWN, and ZONE.
These were labeled with precedences just to avoid attaching explicit
precedences to the productions in which they were the last terminal symbol.
Since a terminal symbol precedence marking can affect many other things
too, it seems like better practice to attach precedence labels to the
productions, and not mark the terminal symbols.

Ideally we'd also remove the precedence attached to NULL_P, but it turns
out that we are actually depending on that having a precedence higher than
POSTFIXOP, else we get a shift/reduce conflict for postfix operators in
b_expr.  (Which more or less proves my point about these markings having a
high risk of unexpected consequences.)  For the moment, move NULL_P into
the set of keywords grouped with IDENT, so that at least it will act
similarly to non-keywords; and document the interaction.
2011-05-05 20:38:52 -04:00
Robert Haas 68ef051f5c Refactor broken CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS support.
Per bug #5988, reported by Marko Tiikkaja, and further analyzed by Tom
Lane, the previous coding was broken in several respects: even if the
target table already existed, a subsequent CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS
might try to add additional constraints or sequences-for-serial
specified in the new CREATE TABLE statement.

In passing, this also fixes a minor information leak: it's no longer
possible to figure out whether a schema to which you don't have CREATE
access contains a sequence named like "x_y_seq" by attempting to create a
table in that schema called "x" with a serial column called "y".

Some more refactoring of this code in the future might be warranted,
but that will need to wait for a later major release.
2011-04-25 16:55:11 -04:00
Robert Haas be90032e0d Remove partial and undocumented GRANT .. FOREIGN TABLE support.
Instead, foreign tables are treated just like views: permissions can
be granted using GRANT privilege ON [TABLE] foreign_table_name TO role,
and revoked similarly.  GRANT/REVOKE .. FOREIGN TABLE is no longer
supported, just as we don't support GRANT/REVOKE .. VIEW.  The set of
accepted permissions for foreign tables is now identical to the set for
regular tables, and views.

Per report from Thom Brown, and subsequent discussion.
2011-04-25 16:39:18 -04:00
Tom Lane 9e9b9ac7d1 Make a code-cleanup pass over the collations patch.
This patch is almost entirely cosmetic --- mostly cleaning up a lot of
neglected comments, and fixing code layout problems in places where the
patch made lines too long and then pgindent did weird things with that.
I did find a bug-of-omission in equalTupleDescs().
2011-04-22 17:43:18 -04:00
Robert Haas 68739ba856 Allow ALTER TABLE name {OF type | NOT OF}.
This syntax allows a standalone table to be made into a typed table,
or a typed table to be made standalone.  This is possibly a mildly
useful feature in its own right, but the real motivation for this
change is that we need it to make pg_upgrade work with typed tables.
This doesn't actually fix that problem, but it's necessary
infrastructure.

Noah Misch
2011-04-20 21:38:47 -04:00
Tom Lane 918854cc08 Fix handling of collations in multi-row VALUES constructs.
Per spec we ought to apply select_common_collation() across the expressions
in each column of the VALUES table.  The original coding was just taking
the first row and assuming it was representative.

This patch adds a field to struct RangeTblEntry to carry the resolved
collations, so initdb is forced for changes in stored rule representation.
2011-04-18 15:31:52 -04:00
Robert Haas 04db0fdbfa Only allow typed tables to hang off composite types, not e.g. tables.
This also ensures that we take a relation lock on the composite type when
creating a typed table, which is necessary to prevent the composite type
and the typed table from getting out of step in the face of concurrent
DDL.

Noah Misch, with some changes.
2011-04-18 10:19:46 -04:00
Tom Lane 921b993677 Fix RI_Initial_Check to use a COLLATE clause when needed in its query.
If the referencing and referenced columns have different collations,
the parser will be unable to resolve which collation to use unless it's
helped out in this way.  The effects are sometimes masked, if we end up
using a non-collation-sensitive plan; but if we do use a mergejoin
we'll see a failure, as recently noted by Robert Haas.

The SQL spec states that the referenced column's collation should be used
to resolve RI checks, so that's what we do.  Note however that we currently
don't append a COLLATE clause when writing a query that examines only the
referencing column.  If we ever support collations that have varying
notions of equality, that will have to be changed.  For the moment, though,
it's preferable to leave it off so that we can use a normal index on the
referencing column.
2011-04-11 21:32:53 -04:00
Peter Eisentraut 5caa3479c2 Clean up most -Wunused-but-set-variable warnings from gcc 4.6
This warning is new in gcc 4.6 and part of -Wall.  This patch cleans
up most of the noise, but there are some still warnings that are
trickier to remove.
2011-04-11 22:28:45 +03:00
Bruce Momjian bf50caf105 pgindent run before PG 9.1 beta 1. 2011-04-10 11:42:00 -04:00
Tom Lane a19002d4e5 Adjust collation determination rules as per discussion.
Remove crude hack that tried to propagate collation through a
function-returning-record, ie, from the function's arguments to individual
fields selected from its result record.  That is just plain inconsistent,
because the function result is composite and cannot have a collation;
and there's no hope of making this kind of action-at-a-distance work
consistently.  Adjust regression test cases that expected this to happen.

Meanwhile, the behavior of casting to a domain with a declared collation
stays the same as it was, since that seemed to be the consensus.
2011-04-09 14:40:09 -04:00
Tom Lane c5ff3ff492 Avoid an unnecessary syscache lookup in parse_coerce.c.
All the other fields of the constant are being extracted from the syscache
entry we already have, so handle collation similarly.  (There don't seem
to be any other uses for the new function at the moment.)
2011-04-08 16:11:41 -04:00
Tom Lane d8d429890d Fix collations when we call transformWhereClause from outside the parser.
Previous patches took care of assorted places that call transformExpr from
outside the main parser, but I overlooked the fact that some places use
transformWhereClause as a shortcut for transformExpr + coerce_to_boolean.
In particular this broke collation-sensitive index WHERE clauses, as per
report from Thom Brown.  Trigger WHEN and rule WHERE clauses too.

I'm not forcing initdb for this fix, but any affected indexes, triggers,
or rules will need to be dropped and recreated.
2011-04-07 02:34:57 -04:00
Robert Haas 50533a6dc5 Support comments on FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER and SERVER objects.
This mostly involves making it work with the objectaddress.c framework,
which does most of the heavy lifting.  In that vein, change
GetForeignDataWrapperOidByName to get_foreign_data_wrapper_oid and
GetForeignServerOidByName to get_foreign_server_oid, to match the
pattern we use for other object types.

Robert Haas and Shigeru Hanada
2011-04-01 11:28:28 -04:00
Tom Lane 0c9d9e8dd6 More collations cleanup, from trawling for missed collation assignments.
Mostly cosmetic, though I did find that generateClonedIndexStmt failed
to clone the index's collations.
2011-03-26 16:35:25 -04:00
Tom Lane b23c9fa929 Clean up a few failures to set collation fields in expression nodes.
I'm not sure these have any non-cosmetic implications, but I'm not sure
they don't, either.  In particular, ensure the CaseTestExpr generated
by transformAssignmentIndirection to represent the base target column
carries the correct collation, because parse_collate.c won't fix that.
Tweak lsyscache.c API so that we can get the appropriate collation
without an extra syscache lookup.
2011-03-26 14:25:48 -04:00
Tom Lane bfa4440ca5 Pass collation to makeConst() instead of looking it up internally.
In nearly all cases, the caller already knows the correct collation, and
in a number of places, the value the caller has handy is more correct than
the default for the type would be.  (In particular, this patch makes it
significantly less likely that eval_const_expressions will result in
changing the exposed collation of an expression.)  So an internal lookup
is both expensive and wrong.
2011-03-25 20:10:42 -04:00
Tom Lane 27dc7e240b Fix handling of collation in SQL-language functions.
Ensure that parameter symbols receive collation from the function's
resolved input collation, and fix inlining to behave properly.

BTW, this commit lays about 90% of the infrastructure needed to support
use of argument names in SQL functions.  Parsing of parameters is now
done via the parser-hook infrastructure ... we'd just need to supply
a column-ref hook ...
2011-03-24 20:30:23 -04:00
Simon Riggs ec497a5ad6 Make FKs valid at creation when added as column constraints.
Bug report from Alvaro Herrera
2011-03-22 23:10:35 +00:00
Tom Lane 37d6d07dda Throw error for indeterminate collation of an ORDER/GROUP/DISTINCT target.
This restores a parse error that was thrown (though only in the ORDER BY
case) by the original collation patch.  I had removed it in my recent
revisions because it was thrown at a place where collations now haven't
been computed yet; but I thought of another way to handle it.

Throwing the error at parse time, rather than leaving it to be done at
runtime, is good because a syntax error pointer is helpful for localizing
the problem.  We can reasonably assume that the comparison function for a
collatable datatype will complain if it doesn't have a collation to use.
Now the planner might choose to implement GROUP or DISTINCT via hashing,
in which case no runtime error would actually occur, but it seems better
to throw error consistently rather than let the error depend on what the
planner chooses to do.  Another possible objection is that the user might
specify a nondefault sort operator that doesn't care about collation
... but that's surely an uncommon usage, and it wouldn't hurt him to throw
in a COLLATE clause anyway.  This change also makes the ORDER BY/GROUP
BY/DISTINCT case more consistent with the UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT case,
which was already coded to throw this error even though the same objections
could be raised there.
2011-03-22 15:58:03 -04:00
Tom Lane b310b6e31c Revise collation derivation method and expression-tree representation.
All expression nodes now have an explicit output-collation field, unless
they are known to only return a noncollatable data type (such as boolean
or record).  Also, nodes that can invoke collation-aware functions store
a separate field that is the collation value to pass to the function.
This avoids confusion that arises when a function has collatable inputs
and noncollatable output type, or vice versa.

Also, replace the parser's on-the-fly collation assignment method with
a post-pass over the completed expression tree.  This allows us to use
a more complex (and hopefully more nearly spec-compliant) assignment
rule without paying for it in extra storage in every expression node.

Fix assorted bugs in the planner's handling of collations by making
collation one of the defining properties of an EquivalenceClass and
by converting CollateExprs into discardable RelabelType nodes during
expression preprocessing.
2011-03-19 20:30:08 -04:00
Tom Lane 72cfc17aef Improve handling of unknown-type literals in UNION/INTERSECT/EXCEPT.
This patch causes unknown-type Consts to be coerced to the resolved output
type of the set operation at parse time.  Formerly such Consts were left
alone until late in the planning stage.  The disadvantage of that approach
is that it disables some optimizations, because the planner sees the set-op
leaf query as having different output column types than the overall set-op.
We saw an example of that in a recent performance gripe from Claudio
Freire.

Fixing such a Const requires scribbling on the leaf query in
transformSetOperationTree, but that should be all right since if the leaf
query's semantics depended on that output column, it would already have
resolved the unknown to something else.

Most of the bulk of this patch is a simple adjustment of
transformSetOperationTree's API so that upper levels can get at the
TargetEntry containing a Const to be replaced: it now returns a list of
TargetEntries, instead of just the bare expressions.
2011-03-15 21:52:10 -04:00
Robert Haas 5ca4dfc79f Remove 13 keywords that are used only for ROLE options.
Review by Tom Lane.
2011-03-15 10:22:58 -04:00
Tom Lane 8acdb8bf9c Split CollateClause into separate raw and analyzed node types.
CollateClause is now used only in raw grammar output, and CollateExpr after
parse analysis.  This is for clarity and to avoid carrying collation names
in post-analysis parse trees: that's both wasteful and possibly misleading,
since the collation's name could be changed while the parsetree still
exists.

Also, clean up assorted infelicities and omissions in processing of the
node type.
2011-03-11 16:28:18 -05:00
Tom Lane a051ef699c Remove collation information from TypeName, where it does not belong.
The initial collations patch treated a COLLATE spec as part of a TypeName,
following what can only be described as brain fade on the part of the SQL
committee.  It's a lot more reasonable to treat COLLATE as a syntactically
separate object, so that it can be added in only the productions where it
actually belongs, rather than needing to reject it in a boatload of places
where it doesn't belong (something the original patch mostly failed to do).
In addition this change lets us meet the spec's requirement to allow
COLLATE anywhere in the clauses of a ColumnDef, and it avoids unfriendly
behavior for constructs such as "foo::type COLLATE collation".

To do this, pull collation information out of TypeName and put it in
ColumnDef instead, thus reverting most of the collation-related changes in
parse_type.c's API.  I made one additional structural change, which was to
use a ColumnDef as an intermediate node in AT_AlterColumnType AlterTableCmd
nodes.  This provides enough room to get rid of the "transform" wart in
AlterTableCmd too, since the ColumnDef can carry the USING expression
easily enough.

Also fix some other minor bugs that have crept in in the same areas,
like failure to copy recently-added fields of ColumnDef in copyfuncs.c.

While at it, document the formerly secret ability to specify a collation
in ALTER TABLE ALTER COLUMN TYPE, ALTER TYPE ADD ATTRIBUTE, and
ALTER TYPE ALTER ATTRIBUTE TYPE; and correct some misstatements about
what the default collation selection will be when COLLATE is omitted.

BTW, the three-parameter form of format_type() should go away too,
since it just contributes to the confusion in this area; but I'll do
that in a separate patch.
2011-03-09 22:39:20 -05:00
Tom Lane 3f7d24da16 Add missing keywords to gram.y's unreserved_keywords list.
We really need an automated check for this ... and did VALIDATE really
need to become a keyword at all, rather than picking some other syntax
using existing keywords?
2011-03-08 16:43:56 -05:00
Tom Lane 8d3b421f5f Allow non-superusers to create (some) extensions.
Remove the unconditional superuser permissions check in CREATE EXTENSION,
and instead define a "superuser" extension property, which when false
(not the default) skips the superuser permissions check.  In this case
the calling user only needs enough permissions to execute the commands
in the extension's installation script.  The superuser property is also
enforced in the same way for ALTER EXTENSION UPDATE cases.

In other ALTER EXTENSION cases and DROP EXTENSION, test ownership of
the extension rather than superuserness.  ALTER EXTENSION ADD/DROP needs
to insist on ownership of the target object as well; to do that without
duplicating code, refactor comment.c's big switch for permissions checks
into a separate function in objectaddress.c.

I also removed the superuserness checks in pg_available_extensions and
related functions; there's no strong reason why everybody shouldn't
be able to see that info.

Also invent an IF NOT EXISTS variant of CREATE EXTENSION, and use that
in pg_dump, so that dumps won't fail for installed-by-default extensions.
We don't have any of those yet, but we will soon.

This is all per discussion of wrapping the standard procedural languages
into extensions.  I'll make those changes in a separate commit; this is
just putting the core infrastructure in place.
2011-03-04 16:08:53 -05:00
Tom Lane 389af95155 Support data-modifying commands (INSERT/UPDATE/DELETE) in WITH.
This patch implements data-modifying WITH queries according to the
semantics that the updates all happen with the same command counter value,
and in an unspecified order.  Therefore one WITH clause can't see the
effects of another, nor can the outer query see the effects other than
through the RETURNING values.  And attempts to do conflicting updates will
have unpredictable results.  We'll need to document all that.

This commit just fixes the code; documentation updates are waiting on
author.

Marko Tiikkaja and Hitoshi Harada
2011-02-25 18:58:02 -05:00
Tom Lane bdca82f44d Add a relkind field to RangeTblEntry to avoid some syscache lookups.
The recent additions for FDW support required checking foreign-table-ness
in several places in the parse/plan chain.  While it's not clear whether
that would really result in a noticeable slowdown, it seems best to avoid
any performance risk by keeping a copy of the relation's relkind in
RangeTblEntry.  That might have some other uses later, anyway.
Per discussion.
2011-02-22 19:24:40 -05:00
Itagaki Takahiro 3cba8240a1 Add ENCODING option to COPY TO/FROM and file_fdw.
File encodings can be specified separately from client encoding.
If not specified, client encoding is used for backward compatibility.

Cases when the encoding doesn't match client encoding are slower
than matched cases because we don't have conversion procs for other
encodings. Performance improvement would be be a future work.

Original patch by Hitoshi Harada, and modified by me.
2011-02-21 14:32:40 +09:00
Tom Lane bb74240794 Implement an API to let foreign-data wrappers actually be functional.
This commit provides the core code and documentation needed.  A contrib
module test case will follow shortly.

Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
2011-02-20 00:18:14 -05:00
Tom Lane 327e025071 Create the catalog infrastructure for foreign-data-wrapper handlers.
Add a fdwhandler column to pg_foreign_data_wrapper, plus HANDLER options
in the CREATE FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER and ALTER FOREIGN DATA WRAPPER commands,
plus pg_dump support for same.  Also invent a new pseudotype fdw_handler
with properties similar to language_handler.

This is split out of the "FDW API" patch for ease of review; it's all stuff
we will certainly need, regardless of any other details of the FDW API.
FDW handler functions will not actually get called yet.

In passing, fix some omissions and infelicities in foreigncmds.c.

Shigeru Hanada, Jan Urbanski, Heikki Linnakangas
2011-02-19 00:07:15 -05:00
Michael Meskes bc423879cc Applied a patch by Zoltán Böszörményi that makes ecpg's parser accept dynamic cursornames even in WHERE CURRENT OF clauses. 2011-02-18 11:16:16 +01:00
Peter Eisentraut b313bca0af DDL support for collations
- collowner field
- CREATE COLLATION
- ALTER COLLATION
- DROP COLLATION
- COMMENT ON COLLATION
- integration with extensions
- pg_dump support for the above
- dependency management
- psql tab completion
- psql \dO command
2011-02-12 15:55:18 +02:00
Tom Lane 1214749901 Add support for multiple versions of an extension and ALTER EXTENSION UPDATE.
This follows recent discussions, so it's quite a bit different from
Dimitri's original.  There will probably be more changes once we get a bit
of experience with it, but let's get it in and start playing with it.

This is still just core code.  I'll start converting contrib modules
shortly.

Dimitri Fontaine and Tom Lane
2011-02-11 21:25:57 -05:00
Alvaro Herrera 60141eefaf Fix comment recently obsoleted 2011-02-11 19:42:51 -03:00
Tom Lane 01467d3e4f Extend "ALTER EXTENSION ADD object" to permit "DROP object" as well.
Per discussion, this is something we should have sooner rather than later,
and it doesn't take much additional code to support it.
2011-02-10 17:37:22 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut ff81aa3eda Update comment
It was still claiming that the keyword list is in keywords.c, when it
is now in kwlist.h.
2011-02-10 22:49:46 +02:00
Tom Lane caddcb8f4b Fix pg_upgrade to handle extensions.
This follows my proposal of yesterday, namely that we try to recreate the
previous state of the extension exactly, instead of allowing CREATE
EXTENSION to run a SQL script that might create some entirely-incompatible
on-disk state.  In --binary-upgrade mode, pg_dump won't issue CREATE
EXTENSION at all, but instead uses a kluge function provided by
pg_upgrade_support to recreate the pg_extension row (and extension-level
pg_depend entries) without creating any member objects.  The member objects
are then restored in the same way as if they weren't members, in particular
using pg_upgrade's normal hacks to preserve OIDs that need to be preserved.
Then, for each member object, ALTER EXTENSION ADD is issued to recreate the
pg_depend entry that marks it as an extension member.

In passing, fix breakage in pg_upgrade's enum-type support: somebody didn't
fix it when the noise word VALUE got added to ALTER TYPE ADD.  Also,
rationalize parsetree representation of COMMENT ON DOMAIN and fix
get_object_address() to allow OBJECT_DOMAIN.
2011-02-09 19:18:08 -05:00
Tom Lane 5bc178b89f Implement "ALTER EXTENSION ADD object".
This is an essential component of making the extension feature usable;
first because it's needed in the process of converting an existing
installation containing "loose" objects of an old contrib module into
the extension-based world, and second because we'll have to use it
in pg_dump --binary-upgrade, as per recent discussion.

Loosely based on part of Dimitri Fontaine's ALTER EXTENSION UPGRADE
patch.
2011-02-09 11:56:37 -05:00
Tom Lane d9572c4e3b Core support for "extensions", which are packages of SQL objects.
This patch adds the server infrastructure to support extensions.
There is still one significant loose end, namely how to make it play nice
with pg_upgrade, so I am not yet committing the changes that would make
all the contrib modules depend on this feature.

In passing, fix a disturbingly large amount of breakage in
AlterObjectNamespace() and callers.

Dimitri Fontaine, reviewed by Anssi Kääriäinen,
Itagaki Takahiro, Tom Lane, and numerous others
2011-02-08 16:13:22 -05:00
Peter Eisentraut 414c5a2ea6 Per-column collation support
This adds collation support for columns and domains, a COLLATE clause
to override it per expression, and B-tree index support.

Peter Eisentraut
reviewed by Pavel Stehule, Itagaki Takahiro, Robert Haas, Noah Misch
2011-02-08 23:04:18 +02:00
Simon Riggs 722bf7017b Extend ALTER TABLE to allow Foreign Keys to be added without initial validation.
FK constraints that are marked NOT VALID may later be VALIDATED, which uses an
ShareUpdateExclusiveLock on constraint table and RowShareLock on referenced
table. Significantly reduces lock strength and duration when adding FKs.
New state visible from psql.

Simon Riggs, with reviews from Marko Tiikkaja and Robert Haas
2011-02-08 12:23:20 +00:00
Heikki Linnakangas dafaa3efb7 Implement genuine serializable isolation level.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.

To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.

A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.

Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.

We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.

Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.

Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
2011-02-08 00:09:08 +02:00