Previously, this function acquired locks in the order using
find_all_inheritors(), which locks the children of each table that it
processes in ascending OID order, and which processes the inheritance
hierarchy as a whole in a breadth-first fashion. Now, it processes
the inheritance hierarchy in a depth-first fashion, and at each level
it proceeds in the order in which tables appear in the PartitionDesc.
If table inheritance rather than table partitioning is used, the old
order is preserved.
This change moves the locking of any given partition much closer to
the code that actually expands that partition. This seems essential
if we ever want to allow concurrent DDL to add or remove partitions,
because if the set of partitions can change, we must use the same data
to decide which partitions to lock as we do to decide which partitions
to expand; otherwise, we might expand a partition that we haven't
locked. It should hopefully also facilitate efforts to postpone
inheritance expansion or locking for performance reasons, because
there's really no way to postpone locking some partitions if
we're blindly locking them all using find_all_inheritors().
The only downside of this change which is known to me is that it
further deviates from the principle that we should always lock the
inheritance hierarchy in find_all_inheritors() order to avoid deadlock
risk. However, we've already crossed that bridge in commit
9eefba181f and there are futher patches
pending that make similar changes, so this isn't really giving up
anything that we haven't surrendered already -- and it seems entirely
worth it, given the performance benefits some of those changes seem
likely to bring.
Patch by me; thanks to David Rowley for discussion of these issues.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f_eEYVEq5tM8sm1k-HOwG0AyCPwX54XG9x4w0zy_N4Q_Q@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZUwPf_uanjF==gTGBMJrn8uCq52XYvAEorNkLrUdoawg@mail.gmail.com
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