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Robert Haas 2ad36c4e44 Improve table locking behavior in the face of current DDL.
In the previous coding, callers were faced with an awkward choice:
look up the name, do permissions checks, and then lock the table; or
look up the name, lock the table, and then do permissions checks.
The first choice was wrong because the results of the name lookup
and permissions checks might be out-of-date by the time the table
lock was acquired, while the second allowed a user with no privileges
to interfere with access to a table by users who do have privileges
(e.g. if a malicious backend queues up for an AccessExclusiveLock on
a table on which AccessShareLock is already held, further attempts
to access the table will be blocked until the AccessExclusiveLock
is obtained and the malicious backend's transaction rolls back).

To fix, allow callers of RangeVarGetRelid() to pass a callback which
gets executed after performing the name lookup but before acquiring
the relation lock.  If the name lookup is retried (because
invalidation messages are received), the callback will be re-executed
as well, so we get the best of both worlds.  RangeVarGetRelid() is
renamed to RangeVarGetRelidExtended(); callers not wishing to supply
a callback can continue to invoke it as RangeVarGetRelid(), which is
now a macro.  Since the only one caller that uses nowait = true now
passes a callback anyway, the RangeVarGetRelid() macro defaults nowait
as well.  The callback can also be used for supplemental locking - for
example, REINDEX INDEX needs to acquire the table lock before the index
lock to reduce deadlock possibilities.

There's a lot more work to be done here to fix all the cases where this
can be a problem, but this commit provides the general infrastructure
and fixes the following specific cases: REINDEX INDEX, REINDEX TABLE,
LOCK TABLE, and and DROP TABLE/INDEX/SEQUENCE/VIEW/FOREIGN TABLE.

Per discussion with Noah Misch and Alvaro Herrera.
2011-11-30 10:27:00 -05:00
config python.m4: Remove useless "import string" calls 2011-11-29 06:50:11 +02:00
contrib Move EXTRA_CLEAN to where it actually works. 2011-11-29 23:14:16 -05:00
doc Change installation docs to mention general debugging options. 2011-11-29 22:35:48 -05:00
src Improve table locking behavior in the face of current DDL. 2011-11-30 10:27:00 -05:00
.gitignore Add gitignore for mingw/cygwin build outputs 2011-06-09 18:11:47 +02:00
aclocal.m4 Remove cvs keywords from all files. 2010-09-20 22:08:53 +02:00
configure python.m4: Remove useless "import string" calls 2011-11-29 06:50:11 +02:00
configure.in Remove scandir() requirement in pg_upgrade; instead just use readdir() 2011-11-17 21:59:49 -05:00
COPYRIGHT Stamp copyrights for year 2011. 2011-01-01 13:18:15 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Build src/ before contrib/ in make world 2011-08-24 21:34:49 +03:00
Makefile Allow make check in PL directories 2011-02-15 06:52:12 +02:00
README Remove useless whitespace at end of lines 2010-11-23 22:34:55 +02:00
README.git Trivial typo fix. 2010-09-21 14:16:00 -04:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the
file HISTORY.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.