Commit Graph

355 Commits

Author SHA1 Message Date
Bruce Momjian
0a78320057 pgindent run for 9.4
This includes removing tabs after periods in C comments, which was
applied to back branches, so this change should not effect backpatching.
2014-05-06 12:12:18 -04:00
Tom Lane
d19bd29f07 Reset pg_stat_activity.xact_start during PREPARE TRANSACTION.
Once we've completed a PREPARE, our session is not running a transaction,
so its entry in pg_stat_activity should show xact_start as null, rather
than leaving the value as the start time of the now-prepared transaction.

I think possibly this oversight was triggered by faulty extrapolation
from the adjacent comment that says PrepareTransaction should not call
AtEOXact_PgStat, so tweak the wording of that comment.

Noted by Andres Freund while considering bug #10123 from Maxim Boguk,
although this error doesn't seem to explain that report.

Back-patch to all active branches.
2014-04-24 13:29:48 -04:00
Robert Haas
b89e151054 Introduce logical decoding.
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables.  The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included.  To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.

Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.

Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.
2014-03-03 16:32:18 -05:00
Bruce Momjian
7e04792a1c Update copyright for 2014
Update all files in head, and files COPYRIGHT and legal.sgml in all back
branches.
2014-01-07 16:05:30 -05:00
Robert Haas
e55704d8b2 Add new wal_level, logical, sufficient for logical decoding.
When wal_level=logical, we'll log columns from the old tuple as
configured by the REPLICA IDENTITY facility added in commit
07cacba983.  This makes it possible
a properly-configured logical replication solution to correctly
follow table updates even if they change the chosen key columns,
or, with REPLICA IDENTITY FULL, even if the table has no key at
all.  Note that updates which do not modify the replica identity
column won't log anything extra, making the choice of a good key
(i.e. one that will rarely be changed) important to performance
when wal_level=logical is configured.

Each insert, update, or delete to a catalog table will also log
the CMIN and/or CMAX values of stamped by the current transaction.
This is necessary because logical decoding will require access to
historical snapshots of the catalog in order to decode some data
types, and the CMIN/CMAX values that we may need in order to judge
row visibility may have been overwritten by the time we need them.

Andres Freund, reviewed in various versions by myself, Heikki
Linnakangas, KONDO Mitsumasa, and many others.
2013-12-10 19:01:40 -05:00
Tom Lane
16e1b7a1b7 Fix assorted race conditions in the new timeout infrastructure.
Prevent handle_sig_alarm from losing control partway through due to a query
cancel (either an asynchronous SIGINT, or a cancel triggered by one of the
timeout handler functions).  That would at least result in failure to
schedule any required future interrupt, and might result in actual
corruption of timeout.c's data structures, if the interrupt happened while
we were updating those.

We could still lose control if an asynchronous SIGINT arrives just as the
function is entered.  This wouldn't break any data structures, but it would
have the same effect as if the SIGALRM interrupt had been silently lost:
we'd not fire any currently-due handlers, nor schedule any new interrupt.
To forestall that scenario, forcibly reschedule any pending timer interrupt
during AbortTransaction and AbortSubTransaction.  We can avoid any extra
kernel call in most cases by not doing that until we've allowed
LockErrorCleanup to kill the DEADLOCK_TIMEOUT and LOCK_TIMEOUT events.

Another hazard is that some platforms (at least Linux and *BSD) block a
signal before calling its handler and then unblock it on return.  When we
longjmp out of the handler, the unblock doesn't happen, and the signal is
left blocked indefinitely.  Again, we can fix that by forcibly unblocking
signals during AbortTransaction and AbortSubTransaction.

These latter two problems do not manifest when the longjmp reaches
postgres.c, because the error recovery code there kills all pending timeout
events anyway, and it uses sigsetjmp(..., 1) so that the appropriate signal
mask is restored.  So errors thrown outside any transaction should be OK
already, and cleaning up in AbortTransaction and AbortSubTransaction should
be enough to fix these issues.  (We're assuming that any code that catches
a query cancel error and doesn't re-throw it will do at least a
subtransaction abort to clean up; but that was pretty much required already
by other subsystems.)

Lastly, ProcSleep should not clear the LOCK_TIMEOUT indicator flag when
disabling that event: if a lock timeout interrupt happened after the lock
was granted, the ensuing query cancel is still going to happen at the next
CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS, and we want to report it as a lock timeout not a user
cancel.

Per reports from Dan Wood.

Back-patch to 9.3 where the new timeout handling infrastructure was
introduced.  We may at some point decide to back-patch the signal
unblocking changes further, but I'll desist from that until we hear
actual field complaints about it.
2013-11-29 16:41:00 -05:00
Bruce Momjian
a6542a4b68 Change SET LOCAL/CONSTRAINTS/TRANSACTION and ABORT behavior
Change SET LOCAL/CONSTRAINTS/TRANSACTION behavior outside of a
transaction block from error (post-9.3) to warning.  (Was nothing in <=
9.3.)  Also change ABORT outside of a transaction block from notice to
warning.
2013-11-25 19:19:40 -05:00
Robert Haas
71901ab6da Introduce InvalidCommandId.
This allows a 32-bit field to represent an *optional* command ID
without a separate flag bit.

Andres Freund
2013-09-09 16:25:29 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
9af4159fce pgindent run for release 9.3
This is the first run of the Perl-based pgindent script.  Also update
pgindent instructions.
2013-05-29 16:58:43 -04:00
Tom Lane
2b78d101d1 Fix SQL function execution to be safe with long-lived FmgrInfos.
fmgr_sql had been designed on the assumption that the FmgrInfo it's called
with has only query lifespan.  This is demonstrably unsafe in connection
with range types, as shown in bug #7881 from Andrew Gierth.  Fix things
so that we re-generate the function's cache data if the (sub)transaction
it was made in is no longer active.

Back-patch to 9.2.  This might be needed further back, but it's not clear
whether the case can realistically arise without range types, so for now
I'll desist from back-patching further.
2013-03-03 17:39:58 -05:00
Tom Lane
fdaf44862b Invent pre-commit/pre-prepare/pre-subcommit events for xact callbacks.
Currently it's only possible for loadable modules to get control during
post-commit cleanup of a transaction.  That doesn't work too well if they
want to do something that could throw an error; for example, an FDW might
need to issue a remote commit, which could well fail.  To improve matters,
extend the existing APIs for XactCallback and SubXactCallback functions
to provide new pre-commit events for this purpose.

The release notes will need to mention that existing callback functions
should be checked to make sure they don't do something unwanted when one
of the new event types occurs.  In the examples within our source tree,
contrib/sepgsql was fine but plpgsql had been a bit too cute.
2013-02-14 20:35:08 -05:00
Bruce Momjian
bd61a623ac Update copyrights for 2013
Fully update git head, and update back branches in ./COPYRIGHT and
legal.sgml files.
2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
Heikki Linnakangas
7bffc9b7bf Update minimum recovery point on truncation.
If a file is truncated, we must update minRecoveryPoint. Once a file is
truncated, there's no going back; it would not be safe to stop recovery
at a point earlier than that anymore.

Per report from Kyotaro HORIGUCHI. Backpatch to 8.4. Before that,
minRecoveryPoint was not updated during recovery at all.
2012-12-10 16:57:16 +02:00
Simon Riggs
f21bb9cfb5 Refactor inCommit flag into generic delayChkpt flag.
Rename PGXACT->inCommit flag into delayChkpt flag,
and generalise comments to allow use in other situations,
such as the forthcoming potential use in checksum patch.
Replace wait loop to look for VXIDs with delayChkpt set.
No user visible changes, not behaviour changes at present.

Simon Riggs, reviewed and rebased by Jeff Davis
2012-12-03 13:13:53 +00:00
Alvaro Herrera
1577b46b7c Split out rmgr rm_desc functions into their own files
This is necessary (but not sufficient) to have them compilable outside
of a backend environment.
2012-11-28 13:01:15 -03:00
Simon Riggs
d9fad1076d Skip searching for subxact locks at commit.
At commit all standby locks are released
for the top-level transaction, so searching
for locks for each subtransaction is both
pointless and costly (N^2) in the presence
of many AccessExclusiveLocks.
2012-11-13 16:00:19 -03:00
Tom Lane
ff3f9c8de5 Close un-owned SMgrRelations at transaction end.
If an SMgrRelation is not "owned" by a relcache entry, don't allow it to
live past transaction end.  This design allows the same SMgrRelation to be
used for blind writes of multiple blocks during a transaction, but ensures
that we don't hold onto such an SMgrRelation indefinitely.  Because an
SMgrRelation typically corresponds to open file descriptors at the fd.c
level, leaving it open when there's no corresponding relcache entry can
mean that we prevent the kernel from reclaiming deleted disk space.
(While CacheInvalidateSmgr messages usually fix that, there are cases
where they're not issued, such as DROP DATABASE.  We might want to add
some more sinval messaging for that, but I'd be inclined to keep this
type of logic anyway, since allowing VFDs to accumulate indefinitely
for blind-written relations doesn't seem like a good idea.)

This code replaces a previous attempt towards the same goal that proved
to be unreliable.  Back-patch to 9.1 where the previous patch was added.
2012-10-17 12:38:21 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera
45326c5a11 Split resowner.h
This lets files that are mere users of ResourceOwner not automatically
include the headers for stuff that is managed by the resowner mechanism.
2012-08-28 18:02:07 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
41fa3dfb0a Update C comment to NOTICE to reflect previous commit changing the error
level, per report from Tom.
2012-08-15 19:09:37 -04:00
Robert Haas
f11e8be3e8 Make commit_delay much smarter.
Instead of letting every backend participating in a group commit wait
independently, have the first one that becomes ready to flush WAL wait
for the configured delay, and let all the others wait just long enough
for that first process to complete its flush.  This greatly increases
the chances of being able to configure a commit_delay setting that
actually improves performance.

As a side consequence of this change, commit_delay now affects all WAL
flushes, rather than just commits.  There was some discussion on
pgsql-hackers about whether to rename the GUC to, say, wal_flush_delay,
but in the absence of consensus I am leaving it alone for now.

Peter Geoghegan, with some changes, mostly to the documentation, by me.
2012-07-02 10:26:31 -04:00
Robert Haas
f83b59997d Make walsender more responsive.
Per testing by Andres Freund, this improves replication performance
and reduces replication latency and latency jitter.  I was a bit
concerned about moving more work into XLogInsert, but testing seems
to show that it's not a problem in practice.

Along the way, improve comments for WaitLatchOrSocket.

Andres Freund.  Review and stylistic cleanup by me.
2012-07-02 09:41:01 -04:00
Alvaro Herrera
77ed0c6950 Tighten up includes in sinvaladt.h, twophase.h, proc.h
Remove proc.h from sinvaladt.h and twophase.h; also replace xlog.h in
proc.h with xlogdefs.h.
2012-06-25 18:40:40 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas
0ab9d1c4b3 Replace XLogRecPtr struct with a 64-bit integer.
This simplifies code that needs to do arithmetic on XLogRecPtrs.

To avoid changing on-disk format of data pages, the LSN on data pages is
still stored in the old format. That should keep pg_upgrade happy. However,
we have XLogRecPtrs embedded in the control file, and in the structs that
are sent over the replication protocol, so this changes breaks compatibility
of pg_basebackup and server. I didn't do anything about this in this patch,
per discussion on -hackers, the right thing to do would to be to change the
replication protocol to be architecture-independent, so that you could use
a newer version of pg_receivexlog, for example, against an older server
version.
2012-06-24 19:19:45 +03:00
Robert Haas
cd80073445 During transaction cleanup, release locks before deleting files.
There's no need to hold onto the locks until the files are needed,
and by doing it this way, we reduce the impact on other backends who
may be awaiting locks we hold.

Noah Misch
2012-06-14 10:19:33 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
927d61eeff Run pgindent on 9.2 source tree in preparation for first 9.3
commit-fest.
2012-06-10 15:20:04 -04:00
Tom Lane
ece01aae47 Scan the buffer pool just once, not once per fork, during relation drop.
This provides a speedup of about 4X when NBuffers is large enough.
There is also a useful reduction in sinval traffic, since we
only do CacheInvalidateSmgr() once not once per fork.

Simon Riggs, reviewed and somewhat revised by Tom Lane
2012-06-07 17:43:11 -04:00
Tom Lane
a04dc87db1 Improve comment for GetStableLatestTransactionId(). 2012-05-31 11:20:02 -04:00
Tom Lane
2755abf386 Teach AbortOutOfAnyTransaction to clean up partially-started transactions.
AbortOutOfAnyTransaction failed to do anything if the state it saw on
entry corresponded to failing partway through StartTransaction.  I fixed
AbortCurrentTransaction to cope with that case way back in commit
60b2444cc3, but evidently overlooked that
AbortOutOfAnyTransaction should do likewise.

Back-patch to all supported branches.  It's not clear that this omission
has any more-than-cosmetic consequences, but it's also not clear that it
doesn't, so back-patching seems the least risky choice.
2012-05-28 23:57:06 -04:00
Simon Riggs
867540b49c Ensure backwards compatibility for GetStableLatestTransactionId() 2012-05-12 13:26:10 +01:00
Simon Riggs
b06679e012 Ensure age() returns a stable value rather than the latest value 2012-05-11 14:36:24 +01:00
Robert Haas
53c5b869b4 Tighten up error recovery for fast-path locking.
The previous code could cause a backend crash after BEGIN; SAVEPOINT a;
LOCK TABLE foo (interrupted by ^C or statement timeout); ROLLBACK TO
SAVEPOINT a; LOCK TABLE foo, and might have leaked strong-lock counts
in other situations.

Report by Zoltán Böszörményi; patch review by Jeff Davis.
2012-04-18 11:17:30 -04:00
Heikki Linnakangas
fe546f3da6 Don't wait for the commit record to be replicated if we wrote no WAL.
When using synchronous replication, we waited for the commit record to be
replicated, but if we our transaction didn't write any other WAL records,
that's not required because we don't even flush the WAL locally to disk in
that case. This lead to long waits when committing a transaction that only
modified a temporary table. Bug spotted by Thom Brown.
2012-04-17 16:28:31 +03:00
Bruce Momjian
e126958c2e Update copyright notices for year 2012. 2012-01-01 18:01:58 -05:00
Tom Lane
d0024cd188 Avoid crashing when we have problems unlinking files post-commit.
smgrdounlink takes care to not throw an ERROR if it fails to unlink
something, but that caution was rendered useless by commit
3396000684, which put an smgrexists call in
front of it; smgrexists *does* throw error if anything looks funny, such
as getting a permissions error from trying to open the file.  If that
happens post-commit, you get a PANIC, and what's worse the same logic
appears in the WAL replay code, so the database even fails to restart.

Restore the intended behavior by removing the smgrexists call --- it isn't
accomplishing anything that we can't do better by adjusting mdunlink's
ideas of whether it ought to warn about ENOENT or not.

Per report from Joseph Shraibman of unrecoverable crash after trying to
drop a table whose FSM fork had somehow gotten chmod'd to 000 permissions.
Backpatch to 8.4, where the bogus coding was introduced.
2011-12-20 15:00:36 -05:00
Robert Haas
ed0b409d22 Move "hot" members of PGPROC into a separate PGXACT array.
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order.  These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.

Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
2011-11-25 08:02:10 -05:00
Tom Lane
bb446b689b Support synchronization of snapshots through an export/import procedure.
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
2011-10-22 18:23:30 -04:00
Tom Lane
57eb009092 Allow snapshot references to still work during transaction abort.
In REPEATABLE READ (nee SERIALIZABLE) mode, an attempt to do
GetTransactionSnapshot() between AbortTransaction and CleanupTransaction
failed, because GetTransactionSnapshot would recompute the transaction
snapshot (which is already wrong, given the isolation mode) and then
re-register it in the TopTransactionResourceOwner, leading to an Assert
because the TopTransactionResourceOwner should be empty of resources after
AbortTransaction.  This is the root cause of bug #6218 from Yamamoto
Takashi.  While changing plancache.c to avoid requesting a snapshot when
handling a ROLLBACK masks the problem, I think this is really a snapmgr.c
bug: it's lower-level than the resource manager mechanism and should not be
shutting itself down before we unwind resource manager resources.  However,
just postponing the release of the transaction snapshot until cleanup time
didn't work because of the circular dependency with
TopTransactionResourceOwner.  Fix by managing the internal reference to
that snapshot manually instead of depending on TopTransactionResourceOwner.
This saves a few cycles as well as making the module layering more
straightforward.  predicate.c's dependencies on TopTransactionResourceOwner
go away too.

I think this is a longstanding bug, but there's no evidence that it's more
than a latent bug, so it doesn't seem worth any risk of back-patching.
2011-09-26 22:25:28 -04:00
Tom Lane
a7801b62f2 Move Timestamp/Interval typedefs and basic macros into datatype/timestamp.h.
As per my recent proposal, this refactors things so that these typedefs and
macros are available in a header that can be included in frontend-ish code.
I also changed various headers that were undesirably including
utils/timestamp.h to include datatype/timestamp.h instead.  Unsurprisingly,
this showed that half the system was getting utils/timestamp.h by way of
xlog.h.

No actual code changes here, just header refactoring.
2011-09-09 13:23:41 -04:00
Simon Riggs
df383b03e6 Partially revoke attempt to improve performance with many savepoints.
Maintain difference between subtransaction release and commit introduced
by earlier patch.
2011-09-07 12:11:26 +01:00
Tom Lane
1609797c25 Clean up the #include mess a little.
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa.  (Actually, the
inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier;
but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct
direction.)  Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of
pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on
xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h.  Clean up
the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had
done so things build again.

This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run
without adult supervision.  Inclusion changes in header files in particular
need to be reviewed with great care.  More generally, it'd be good if we
had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely
include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
2011-09-04 01:13:16 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
6416a82a62 Remove unnecessary #include references, per pgrminclude script. 2011-09-01 10:04:27 -04:00
Simon Riggs
7cb7122800 Remove O(N^2) performance issue with multiple SAVEPOINTs.
Subtransaction locks now released en masse at main commit, rather than
repeatedly re-scanning for locks as we ascend the nested transaction tree.
Split transaction state TBLOCK_SUBEND into two states, TBLOCK_SUBCOMMIT
and TBLOCK_SUBRELEASE to allow the commit path to be optimised using
the existing code in ResourceOwnerRelease() which appears to have been
intended for this usage, judging from comments therein.
2011-07-19 17:21:24 +01:00
Simon Riggs
465883b0a2 Introduce compact WAL record for the common case of commit (non-DDL).
XLOG_XACT_COMMIT_COMPACT leaves out invalidation messages and relfilenodes,
saving considerable space for the vast majority of transaction commits.
XLOG_XACT_COMMIT keeps same definition as XLOG_PAGE_MAGIC 0xD067 and earlier.

Leonardo Francalanci and Simon Riggs
2011-06-28 22:58:17 +01:00
Tom Lane
d2088ae949 Move RegisterPredicateLockingXid() call to a safer place.
The SSI patch inserted a call of RegisterPredicateLockingXid into
GetNewTransactionId, which was a bad idea on a couple of grounds.  First,
it's not necessary to hold XidGenLock while manipulating that shared
memory, and doing so is bad because XidGenLock is a high-contention lock
that should be held for as short a time as possible.  (Not to mention that
it adds an entirely unnecessary deadlock hazard, since we must take
SerializableXactHashLock as well.)  Second, the specific place where it was
put was between extending CLOG and advancing nextXid, which could result in
unpleasant behavior in case of a failure there.  Pull the call out to
AssignTransactionId, which is much safer and arguably better from a
modularity standpoint too.

There is more work to do to clean up the failure-before-advancing-nextXid
issue, but that is a separate change that will need to be back-patched.
So for the moment I just want to make GetNewTransactionId look the same as
it did in prior versions.
2011-05-06 12:57:28 -04:00
Bruce Momjian
bf50caf105 pgindent run before PG 9.1 beta 1. 2011-04-10 11:42:00 -04:00
Simon Riggs
88f32b7ca2 Avoid assuming there will be only 3 states for synchronous_commit.
Also avoid hardcoding the current default state by giving it the name
"on" and replace with a meaningful name that reflects its behaviour.
Coding only, no change in behaviour.
2011-04-04 23:23:13 +01:00
Robert Haas
240067b3b0 Merge synchronous_replication setting into synchronous_commit.
This means one less thing to configure when setting up synchronous
replication, and also avoids some ambiguity around what the behavior
should be when the settings of these variables conflict.

Fujii Masao, with additional hacking by me.
2011-04-04 16:25:52 -04:00
Simon Riggs
a8a8a3e096 Efficient transaction-controlled synchronous replication.
If a standby is broadcasting reply messages and we have named
one or more standbys in synchronous_standby_names then allow
users who set synchronous_replication to wait for commit, which
then provides strict data integrity guarantees. Design avoids
sending and receiving transaction state information so minimises
bookkeeping overheads. We synchronize with the highest priority
standby that is connected and ready to synchronize. Other standbys
can be defined to takeover in case of standby failure.

This version has very strict behaviour; more relaxed options
may be added at a later date.

Simon Riggs and Fujii Masao, with reviews by Yeb Havinga, Jaime
Casanova, Heikki Linnakangas and Robert Haas, plus the assistance
of many other design reviewers.
2011-03-06 22:49:16 +00:00
Tom Lane
a874fe7b4c Refactor the executor's API to support data-modifying CTEs better.
The originally committed patch for modifying CTEs didn't interact well
with EXPLAIN, as noted by myself, and also had corner-case problems with
triggers, as noted by Dean Rasheed.  Those problems show it is really not
practical for ExecutorEnd to call any user-defined code; so split the
cleanup duties out into a new function ExecutorFinish, which must be called
between the last ExecutorRun call and ExecutorEnd.  Some Asserts have been
added to these functions to help verify correct usage.

It is no longer necessary for callers of the executor to call
AfterTriggerBeginQuery/AfterTriggerEndQuery for themselves, as this is now
done by ExecutorStart/ExecutorFinish respectively.  If you really need to
suppress that and do it for yourself, pass EXEC_FLAG_SKIP_TRIGGERS to
ExecutorStart.

Also, refactor portal commit processing to allow for the possibility that
PortalDrop will invoke user-defined code.  I think this is not actually
necessary just yet, since the portal-execution-strategy logic forces any
non-pure-SELECT query to be run to completion before we will consider
committing.  But it seems like good future-proofing.
2011-02-27 13:44:12 -05:00
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