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Alvaro Herrera d441cff142 Fix traversal of half-frozen update chains
When some tuple versions in an update chain are frozen due to them being
older than freeze_min_age, the xmax/xmin trail can become broken.  This
breaks HOT (and probably other things).  A subsequent VACUUM can break
things in more serious ways, such as leaving orphan heap-only tuples
whose root HOT redirect items were removed.  This can be seen because
index creation (or REINDEX) complain like
  ERROR:  XX000: failed to find parent tuple for heap-only tuple at (0,7) in table "t"

Because of relfrozenxid contraints, we cannot avoid the freezing of the
early tuples, so we must cope with the results: whenever we see an Xmin
of FrozenTransactionId, consider it a match for whatever the previous
Xmax value was.

This problem seems to have appeared in 9.3 with multixact changes,
though strictly speaking it seems unrelated.

Since 9.4 we have commit 37484ad2a "Change the way we mark tuples as
frozen", so the fix is simple: just compare the raw Xmin (still stored
in the tuple header, since freezing merely set an infomask bit) to the
Xmax.  But in 9.3 we rewrite the Xmin value to FrozenTransactionId, so
the original value is lost and we have nothing to compare the Xmax with.
To cope with that case we need to compare the Xmin with FrozenXid,
assume it's a match, and hope for the best.  Sadly, since you can
pg_upgrade a 9.3 instance containing half-frozen pages to newer
releases, we need to keep the old check in newer versions too, which
seems a bit brittle; I hope we can somehow get rid of that.

I didn't optimize the new function for performance.  The new coding is
probably a bit slower than before, since there is a function call rather
than a straight comparison, but I'd rather have it work correctly than
be fast but wrong.

This is a followup after 20b6552242 fixed a few related problems.
Apparently, in 9.6 and up there are more ways to get into trouble, but
in 9.3 - 9.5 I cannot reproduce a problem anymore with this patch, so
there must be a separate bug.

Reported-by: Peter Geoghegan
Diagnosed-by: Peter Geoghegan, Michael Paquier, Daniel Wood,
	Yi Wen Wong, Álvaro
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wznm4rCrhFAiwKPWTpEw2bXDtgROZK7jWWGucXeH3D1fmA@mail.gmail.com
2017-10-06 17:14:42 +02:00
config Absorb -D_USE_32BIT_TIME_T switch from Perl, if relevant. 2017-08-14 11:48:59 -04:00
contrib Fix more user-visible elog() calls. 2017-10-05 08:03:04 -04:00
doc Improve the CREATE POLICY documentation. 2017-09-27 17:10:35 +01:00
src Fix traversal of half-frozen update chains 2017-10-06 17:14:42 +02:00
.dir-locals.el emacs: Set indent-tabs-mode in perl-mode 2015-04-12 23:53:23 -04:00
.gitattributes Fix whitespace and remove obsolete gitattributes entry 2016-03-13 16:03:13 -04:00
.gitignore Add .gitignore entries for AIX-specific intermediate build artifacts. 2015-07-08 20:44:22 -04:00
aclocal.m4 Replace our hacked version of ax_pthread.m4 with latest upstream version. 2015-07-08 20:36:06 +03:00
configure Avoid SIGBUS on Linux when a DSM memory request overruns tmpfs. 2017-09-25 16:09:20 -04:00
configure.in Avoid SIGBUS on Linux when a DSM memory request overruns tmpfs. 2017-09-25 16:09:20 -04:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyright for 2017 2017-01-03 12:37:53 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Fix distclean/maintainer-clean targets to remove top-level tmp_install dir. 2015-05-13 18:48:05 -04:00
HISTORY Change documentation references to PG website to use https: not http: 2017-05-20 21:50:47 -04:00
Makefile Prevent passing down MAKELEVEL/MAKEFLAGS from non-GNU make to GNU make. 2017-08-09 12:06:08 -04:00
README Change documentation references to PG website to use https: not http: 2017-05-20 21:50:47 -04:00
README.git Change documentation references to PG website to use https: not http: 2017-05-20 21:50:47 -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:

	https://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.  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
https://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at https://www.postgresql.org/.