postgresql/src/test
Tomas Vondra 3581cbdcd6 Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN
BRIN indexes did not properly distinguish between summaries for empty
(no rows) and all-NULL ranges, treating them as essentially the same
thing. Summaries were initialized with allnulls=true, and opclasses
simply reset allnulls to false when processing the first non-NULL value.
This however produces incorrect results if the range starts with a NULL
value (or a sequence of NULL values), in which case we forget the range
contains NULL values when adding the first non-NULL value.

This happens because the allnulls flag is used for two separate
purposes - to mark empty ranges (not representing any rows yet) and
ranges containing only NULL values.

Opclasses don't know which of these cases it is, and so don't know
whether to set hasnulls=true. Setting the flag in both cases would make
it correct, but it would also make BRIN indexes useless for queries with
IS NULL clauses. All ranges start empty (and thus allnulls=true), so all
ranges would end up with either allnulls=true or hasnulls=true.

The severity of the issue is somewhat reduced by the fact that it only
happens when adding values to an existing summary with allnulls=true.
This can happen e.g. for small tables (because a summary for the first
range exists for all BRIN indexes), or for tables with large fraction of
NULL values in the indexed columns.

Bulk summarization (e.g. during CREATE INDEX or automatic summarization)
that processes all values at once is not affected by this issue. In this
case the flags were updated in a slightly different way, not forgetting
the NULL values.

To identify empty ranges we use a new flag, stored in an unused bit in
the BRIN tuple header so the on-disk format remains the same. A matching
flag is added to BrinMemTuple, into a 3B gap after bt_placeholder.
That means there's no risk of ABI breakage, although we don't actually
pass the BrinMemTuple to any public API.

We could also skip storing index tuples for empty summaries, but then
we'd have to always process such ranges - even if there are no rows in
large parts of the table (e.g. after a bulk DELETE), it would still
require reading the pages etc. So we store them, but ignore them when
building the bitmap.

Backpatch to 11. The issue exists since BRIN indexes were introduced in
9.5, but older releases are already EOL.

Backpatch-through: 11
Reviewed-by: Justin Pryzby, Matthias van de Meent, Alvaro Herrera
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/402430e4-7d9d-6cf1-09ef-464d80afff3b@enterprisedb.com
2023-05-19 01:29:44 +02:00
..
authentication libpq: Error message improvement 2023-05-16 08:59:34 +02:00
examples Update copyright for 2023 2023-01-02 15:00:37 -05:00
icu initdb: derive encoding from locale for ICU; similar to libc. 2023-03-10 10:51:24 -08:00
isolation Fix some typos and some incorrectly duplicated words 2023-04-18 14:03:49 +12:00
kerberos libpq: Error message improvement 2023-05-16 08:59:34 +02:00
ldap Fix various typos 2023-04-18 13:23:23 +12:00
locale Update copyright for 2023 2023-01-02 15:00:37 -05:00
mb Fix MB regression tests for WAL-logging of hash indexes. 2017-03-15 07:25:36 -04:00
modules Fix handling of empty ranges and NULLs in BRIN 2023-05-19 01:29:44 +02:00
perl Add missing uninstallation rule for BackgroundPsql.pm 2023-05-02 09:41:03 +02:00
recovery Fix the race condition in the test case added by commit a6e04b1d20. 2023-05-09 14:25:33 +05:30
regress Reduce icu_validation_level default to WARNING. 2023-05-17 13:18:40 -07:00
ssl Fix errormessage for missing system CA in OpenSSL 3.1 2023-04-19 12:54:58 +02:00
subscription Fix typos in comments 2023-05-02 12:23:08 +09:00
Makefile Refactor PG_TEST_EXTRA logic in autoconf build 2022-09-20 11:24:16 -07:00
meson.build Update copyright for 2023 2023-01-02 15:00:37 -05:00
README Remove the option to build thread_test.c outside configure. 2020-10-21 12:08:48 -04:00

PostgreSQL tests
================

This directory contains a variety of test infrastructure as well as some of the
tests in PostgreSQL. Not all tests are here -- in particular, there are more in
individual contrib/ modules and in src/bin.

Not all these tests get run by "make check". Check src/test/Makefile to see
which tests get run automatically.

authentication/
  Tests for authentication (but see also below)

examples/
  Demonstration programs for libpq that double as regression tests via
  "make check"

isolation/
  Tests for concurrent behavior at the SQL level

kerberos/
  Tests for Kerberos/GSSAPI authentication and encryption

ldap/
  Tests for LDAP-based authentication

locale/
  Sanity checks for locale data, encodings, etc

mb/
  Tests for multibyte encoding (UTF-8) support

modules/
  Extensions used only or mainly for test purposes, generally not suitable
  for installing in production databases

perl/
  Infrastructure for Perl-based TAP tests

recovery/
  Test suite for recovery and replication

regress/
  PostgreSQL's main regression test suite, pg_regress

ssl/
  Tests to exercise and verify SSL certificate handling

subscription/
  Tests for logical replication