Inserting (in retail) into the new 9.4 format GIN posting tree created much
larger WAL records than in 9.3. The previous strategy to WAL logging was
basically to log the whole page on each change, with the exception of
completely unmodified segments up to the first modified one. That was not
too bad when appending to the end of the page, as only the last segment had
to be WAL-logged, but per Fujii Masao's testing, even that produced 2x the
WAL volume that 9.3 did.
The new strategy is to keep track of changes to the posting lists in a more
fine-grained fashion, and also make the repacking" code smarter to avoid
decoding and re-encoding segments unnecessarily.
GIN posting lists are now encoded using varbyte-encoding, which allows them
to fit in much smaller space than the straight ItemPointer array format used
before. The new encoding is used for both the lists stored in-line in entry
tree items, and in posting tree leaf pages.
To maintain backwards-compatibility and keep pg_upgrade working, the code
can still read old-style pages and tuples. Posting tree leaf pages in the
new format are flagged with GIN_COMPRESSED flag, to distinguish old and new
format pages. Likewise, entry tree tuples in the new format have a
GIN_ITUP_COMPRESSED flag set in a bit that was previously unused.
This patch bumps GIN_CURRENT_VERSION from 1 to 2. New indexes created with
version 9.4 will therefore have version number 2 in the metapage, while old
pg_upgraded indexes will have version 1. The code treats them the same, but
it might be come handy in the future, if we want to drop support for the
uncompressed format.
Alexander Korotkov and me. Reviewed by Tomas Vondra and Amit Langote.
In the GIN incomplete-splits patch, I used BlockIdDatas to store the block
number of left and right children, when inserting a downlink after a split
to an internal page posting list page. But gin_desc thought they were stored
as BlockNumbers.
Replace it with an approach similar to what GiST uses: when a page is split,
the left sibling is marked with a flag indicating that the parent hasn't been
updated yet. When the parent is updated, the flag is cleared. If an insertion
steps on a page with the flag set, it will finish split before proceeding
with the insertion.
The post-recovery cleanup mechanism was never totally reliable, as insertion
to the parent could fail e.g because of running out of memory or disk space,
leaving the tree in an inconsistent state.
This also divides the responsibility of WAL-logging more clearly between
the generic ginbtree.c code, and the parts specific to entry and posting
trees. There is now a common WAL record format for insertions and deletions,
which is written by ginbtree.c, followed by tree-specific payload, which is
returned by the placetopage- and split- callbacks.
Heikki Linnakangas
Bruce Momjian
Robert Haas
Alvaro Herrera