Repeatedly rewriting a mapped catalog table with VACUUM FULL or
CLUSTER could cause logical decoding to fail with:
ERROR, "could not map filenode \"%s\" to relation OID"
To trigger the problem the rewritten catalog had to have live tuples
with toasted columns.
The problem was triggered as during catalog table rewrites the
heap_insert() check that prevents logical decoding information to be
emitted for system catalogs, failed to treat the new heap's toast table
as a system catalog (because the new heap is not recognized as a
catalog table via RelationIsLogicallyLogged()). The relmapper, in
contrast to the normal catalog contents, does not contain historical
information. After a single rewrite of a mapped table the new relation
is known to the relmapper, but if the table is rewritten twice before
logical decoding occurs, the relfilenode cannot be mapped to a
relation anymore. Which then leads us to error out. This only
happens for toast tables, because the main table contents aren't
re-inserted with heap_insert().
The fix is simple, add a new heap_insert() flag that prevents logical
decoding information from being emitted, and accept during decoding
that there might not be tuple data for toast tables.
Unfortunately that does not fix pre-existing logical decoding
errors. Doing so would require not throwing an error when a filenode
cannot be mapped to a relation during decoding, and that seems too
likely to hide bugs. If it's crucial to fix decoding for an existing
slot, temporarily changing the ERROR in ReorderBufferCommit() to a
WARNING appears to be the best fix.
Author: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180914021046.oi7dm4ra3ot2g2kt@alap3.anarazel.de
Backpatch: 9.4-, where logical decoding was introduced
e9edc1ba0b