This creates a new gin-btree callback function for creating a downlink for
a page. Previously, ginxlog.c duplicated the logic used during normal
operation.
If a page is deleted, and reused for something else, just as a search is
following a rightlink to it from its left sibling, the search would continue
scanning whatever the new contents of the page are. That could lead to
incorrect query results, or even something more curious if the page is
reused for a different kind of a page.
To fix, modify the search algorithm to lock the next page before releasing
the previous one, and refrain from deleting pages from the leftmost branch
of the tree.
Add a new Concurrency section to the README, explaining why this works.
There is a lot more one could say about concurrency in GIN, but that's for
another patch.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
Merge the isEnoughSpace and placeToPage functions in the b-tree interface
into one function that tries to put a tuple on page, and returns false if
it doesn't fit.
Move createPostingTree function to gindatapage.c, and change its contract
so that it can be passed more items than fit on the root page. It's in a
better position than the callers to know how many items fit.
Move ginMergeItemPointers out of gindatapage.c, into a separate file.
These changes make no difference now, but reduce the footprint of Alexander
Korotkov's upcoming patch to pack item pointers more tightly.
This avoids an assumption about the signed number representation. It is
anticipated to have no functional changes on supported configurations;
many two's complement assumptions remain elsewhere.
Per a suggestion from Andres Freund.
It makes for cleaner code to have separate Get/Add functions for PostingItems
and ItemPointers. A few callsites that have to deal with both types need to
be duplicated because of this, but all the callers have to know which one
they're dealing with anyway. Overall, this reduces the amount of casting
required.
Extracted from Alexander Korotkov's larger patch to change the data page
format.
It seems to make more sense to use "cutoff multixact" terminology
throughout the backend code; "freeze" is associated with replacing of an
Xid with FrozenTransactionId, which is not what we do for MultiXactIds.
Andres Freund
Some adjustments by Álvaro Herrera
When upgrading from servers of versions 9.2 and older, and MultiXactIds
have been used in the old server beyond the first page (that is, 2048
multis or more in the default 8kB-page build), pg_upgrade would set the
next multixact offset to use beyond what has been allocated in the new
cluster. This would cause a failure the first time the new cluster
needs to use this value, because the pg_multixact/offsets/ file wouldn't
exist or wouldn't be large enough. To fix, ensure that the transient
server instances launched by pg_upgrade extend the file as necessary.
Per report from Jesse Denardo in
CANiVXAj4c88YqipsyFQPboqMudnjcNTdB3pqe8ReXqAFQ=HXyA@mail.gmail.com
This patch replaces WALInsertLock with a number of WAL insertion slots,
allowing multiple backends to insert WAL records to the WAL buffers
concurrently. This is particularly useful for parallel loading large amounts
of data on a system with many CPUs.
This has one user-visible change: switching to a new WAL segment with
pg_switch_xlog() now fills the remaining unused portion of the segment with
zeros. This potentially adds some overhead, but it has been a very common
practice by DBA's to clear the "tail" of the segment with an external
pg_clearxlogtail utility anyway, to make the WAL files compress better.
With this patch, it's no longer necessary to do that.
This patch adds a new GUC, xloginsert_slots, to tune the number of WAL
insertion slots. Performance testing suggests that the default, 8, works
pretty well for all kinds of worklods, but I left the GUC in place to allow
others with different hardware to test that easily. We might want to remove
that before release.
Reviewed by Andres Freund.
In 9.3, there's no particular limit on the number of bgworkers;
instead, we just count up the number that are actually registered,
and use that to set MaxBackends. However, that approach causes
problems for Hot Standby, which needs both MaxBackends and the
size of the lock table to be the same on the standby as on the
master, yet it may not be desirable to run the same bgworkers in
both places. 9.3 handles that by failing to notice the problem,
which will probably work fine in nearly all cases anyway, but is
not theoretically sound.
A further problem with simply counting the number of registered
workers is that new workers can't be registered without a
postmaster restart. This is inconvenient for administrators,
since bouncing the postmaster causes an interruption of service.
Moreover, there are a number of applications for background
processes where, by necessity, the background process must be
started on the fly (e.g. parallel query). While this patch
doesn't actually make it possible to register new background
workers after startup time, it's a necessary prerequisite.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier.
Treat TOAST index just the same as normal one and get the OID
of TOAST index from pg_index but not pg_class.reltoastidxid.
This change allows us to handle multiple TOAST indexes, and
which is required infrastructure for upcoming
REINDEX CONCURRENTLY feature.
Patch by Michael Paquier, reviewed by Andres Freund and me.
To that end, support tags rather than lengths for external datums.
As an example of how this can be used, add support or "indirect"
tuples which point to some externally allocated memory containing
a toast tuple. Similar infrastructure could be used for other
purposes, including, perhaps, support for alternative compression
algorithms.
Andres Freund, reviewed by Hitoshi Harada and myself
SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
versions of the row. In many cases, we work around this by requiring
DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
failures occur as a result. This commit doesn't change anything
related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
strength reductions in the future.
The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow. However, testing
of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
severe except under fairly extreme workloads. To mitigate those
problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
been processed. The catcache machinery already requires that
invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
than scanning the catalog at all. Thus, making snapshot reuse
dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
already subtly broken.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
MarkBufferDirtyHint() writes WAL, and should know if it's got a
standard buffer or not. Currently, the only callers where buffer_std
is false are related to the FSM.
In passing, rename XLOG_HINT to XLOG_FPI, which is more descriptive.
Back-patch to 9.3.
SP-GiST's original scheme for avoiding deadlocks during concurrent index
insertions doesn't work, as per report from Hailong Li, and there isn't any
evident way to make it work completely. We could possibly lock individual
inner tuples instead of their whole pages, but preliminary experimentation
suggests that the performance penalty would be huge. Instead, if we fail
to get a buffer lock while descending the tree, just restart the tree
descent altogether. We keep the old tuple positioning rules, though, in
hopes of reducing the number of cases where this can happen.
Teodor Sigaev, somewhat edited by Tom Lane
Checksums are set immediately prior to flush out of shared buffers
and checked when pages are read in again. Hint bit setting will
require full page write when block is dirtied, which causes various
infrastructure changes. Extensive comments, docs and README.
WARNING message thrown if checksum fails on non-all zeroes page;
ERROR thrown but can be disabled with ignore_checksum_failure = on.
Feature enabled by an initdb option, since transition from option off
to option on is long and complex and has not yet been implemented.
Default is not to use checksums.
Checksum used is WAL CRC-32 truncated to 16-bits.
Simon Riggs, Jeff Davis, Greg Smith
Wide input and assistance from many community members. Thank you.
If we were about to enter archive recovery after crash recovery, we scanned
the archive for the latest tli history file, and set the recovery target
timeline to that. However, when we actually tried to read the history file,
we would not fetch the file from the archive, because we were not in archive
recovery yet.
To fix, make readTimeLineHistory and existsTimeLineHistory to always fetch
the file from archive if archive recovery is requested, even if we're not in
archive recovery yet.
Backpatch to 9.2. Mitsumasa KONDO
fmgr_sql had been designed on the assumption that the FmgrInfo it's called
with has only query lifespan. This is demonstrably unsafe in connection
with range types, as shown in bug #7881 from Andrew Gierth. Fix things
so that we re-generate the function's cache data if the (sub)transaction
it was made in is no longer active.
Back-patch to 9.2. This might be needed further back, but it's not clear
whether the case can realistically arise without range types, so for now
I'll desist from back-patching further.
This is a forward-patch of commit 6f4b8a4f4f,
applied to 9.2 back in August. The plan was to do something else in master,
but it looks like it's not going to happen, so let's just apply the 9.2
solution to master as well.
Fujii Masao
Currently it's only possible for loadable modules to get control during
post-commit cleanup of a transaction. That doesn't work too well if they
want to do something that could throw an error; for example, an FDW might
need to issue a remote commit, which could well fail. To improve matters,
extend the existing APIs for XactCallback and SubXactCallback functions
to provide new pre-commit events for this purpose.
The release notes will need to mention that existing callback functions
should be checked to make sure they don't do something unwanted when one
of the new event types occurs. In the examples within our source tree,
contrib/sepgsql was fine but plpgsql had been a bit too cute.
The reason this wasn't supported before was that GiST indexes need an
increasing sequence to detect concurrent page-splits. In a regular WAL-
logged GiST index, the LSN of the page-split record is used for that
purpose, and in a temporary index, we can get away with a backend-local
counter. Neither of those methods works for an unlogged relation.
To provide such an increasing sequence of numbers, create a "fake LSN"
counter that is saved and restored across shutdowns. On recovery, unlogged
relations are blown away, so the counter doesn't need to survive that
either.
Jeevan Chalke, based on discussions with Robert Haas, Tom Lane and me.
This isn't used for anything but a sanity check at the moment, but it could
be highly valuable for debugging purposes. It could also be used to recreate
timeline history by traversing WAL, which seems useful.
Improve comments, rename some variables and functions, slightly simplify
a couple of APIs, in an attempt to make this code readable by people other
than its original author.
Even though this is essentially just cosmetic, back-patch to all active
branches, because otherwise it's going to make back-patching future fixes
in this file very painful.
When considering a non-last column in a multi-column GiST index,
gistsplit.c tries to improve on the split chosen by the opclass-specific
pickSplit function by considering penalties for the next column. However,
there were two bugs in this code: it failed to recompute the union keys for
the leftmost index columns, even though these might well change after
reassigning tuples; and it included the old union keys in the recomputation
for the columns it did recompute, so that those keys couldn't get smaller
even if they should. The first problem could result in an invalid index
in which searches wouldn't find index entries that are in fact present;
the second would make the index less efficient to search.
Both of these errors were caused by misuse of gistMakeUnionItVec, whose
API was designed in a way that just begged such errors to be made. There
is no situation in which it's safe or useful to compute the union keys for
a subset of the index columns, and there is no caller that wants any
previous union keys to be included in the computation; so the undocumented
choice to treat the union keys as in/out rather than pure output parameters
is a waste of code as well as being dangerous.
Hence, rather than just making a minimal patch, I've changed the API of
gistMakeUnionItVec to remove the "startkey" parameter (it now always
processes all index columns) and treat the attr/isnull arrays as purely
output parameters.
In passing, also get rid of a couple of unnecessary and dangerous uses
of static variables in gistutil.c. It's remarkable that the one in
gistMakeUnionKey hasn't given us portability troubles before now, because
in addition to posing a re-entrancy hazard, it was unsafely assuming that
a static char[] array would have at least Datum alignment.
Per investigation of a trouble report from Tomas Vondra. (There are also
some bugs in contrib/btree_gist to be fixed, but that seems like material
for a separate patch.) Back-patch to all supported branches.
The new rmgrlist.h header, containing all necessary data
about built-in resource managers, allows other pieces of code to
access them.
In particular, this allows a future pg_xlogdump program to extract
rm_desc function pointers, without having to keep a duplicate list of
them.
This patch addresses the problem that applications currently have to
extract object names from possibly-localized textual error messages,
if they want to know for example which index caused a UNIQUE_VIOLATION
failure. It adds new error message fields to the wire protocol, which
can carry the name of a table, table column, data type, or constraint
associated with the error. (Since the protocol spec has always instructed
clients to ignore unrecognized field types, this should not create any
compatibility problem.)
Support for providing these new fields has been added to just a limited set
of error reports (mainly, those in the "integrity constraint violation"
SQLSTATE class), but we will doubtless add them to more calls in future.
Pavel Stehule, reviewed and extensively revised by Peter Geoghegan, with
additional hacking by Tom Lane.
pg_ctl promote -m fast will skip the checkpoint at end of recovery so that we
can achieve very fast failover when the apply delay is low. Write new WAL record
XLOG_END_OF_RECOVERY to allow us to switch timeline correctly for downstream log
readers. If we skip synchronous end of recovery checkpoint we request a normal
spread checkpoint so that the window of re-recovery is low.
Simon Riggs and Kyotaro Horiguchi, with input from Fujii Masao.
Review by Heikki Linnakangas
Tuples marked SELECT FOR UPDATE in a cluster that's later processed by
pg_upgrade would have a different infomask bit pattern than those
produced by 9.3dev; that bit pattern was being seen as "dead" by HEAD
(because they would fail the "is this tuple locked" test, and so the
visibility rules would thing they're updated, even though there's no
HEAP_UPDATED version of them). In other words, some rows could silently
disappear after pg_upgrade.
With this new definition, those tuples become visible again.
This is breakage resulting from my commit 0ac5ad5134.
This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE". These don't block each
other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
FOR UPDATE". UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.
Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
point of this patch.
The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
be stored alongside its Xid. Also, multixacts now need to persist
across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
only tuple locks, but also tuple updates. This means we need more
careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
can be removed. pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
servers.
Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
available from the tuple header. This is considered acceptable, because
the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.
Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
of the tuple there exist.)
With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
foreign key rules should be much reduced.
As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.
Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
overall behavior is sane. There's probably room for several more tests.
There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it. Original idea for the
patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.
This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
important start at the following message-ids:
AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
When a standby server follows the master using WAL archive, and it chooses
a new timeline (recovery_target_timeline='latest'), it only fetches the
timeline history file for the chosen target timeline, not any other history
files that might be missing from pg_xlog. For example, if the current
timeline is 2, and we choose 4 as the new recovery target timeline, the
history file for timeline 3 is not fetched, even if it's part of this
server's history. That's enough for the standby itself - the history file
for timeline 4 includes timeline 3 as well - but if a cascading standby
server wants to recover to timeline 3, it needs the history file. To fix,
when a new recovery target timeline is chosen, try to copy any missing
history files from the archive to pg_xlog between the old and new target
timeline.
A second similar issue was with the WAL files. When a standby recovers from
archive, and it reaches a segment that contains a switch to a new timeline,
recovery fetches only the WAL file labelled with the new timeline's ID. The
file from the new timeline contains a copy of the WAL from the old timeline
up to the point where the switch happened, and recovery recovers it from the
new file. But in streaming replication, walsender only tries to read it
from the old timeline's file. To fix, change walsender to read it from the
new file, so that it behaves the same as recovery in that sense, and doesn't
try to open the possibly nonexistent file with the old timeline's ID.
The xlogreader refactoring broke the logic to decide which timeline to start
streaming from. XLogPageRead() uses the timeline history to check which
timeline the requested WAL position falls into. However, after the
refactoring, XLogPageRead() is always first called with the first page in
the segment, to verify the segment header, and only then with the actual WAL
position we're interested in. That first read of the segment's header made
XLogPageRead() to always start streaming from the old timeline containing
the segment header, not the timeline containing the actual record, if there
was a timeline switch within the segment.
I thought I fixed this yesterday, but that fix was too narrow and only fixed
this for the corner-case that the timeline switch happened in the first page
of the segment. To fix this more robustly, pass explicitly the position of
the record we're actually interested in to XLogPageRead, and use that to
decide which timeline to read from, rather than deduce it from the page and
offset.
Per report from Fujii Masao.
This mirrors the changes done earlier to the server in standby mode. When
receivelog reaches the end of a timeline, as reported by the server, it
fetches the timeline history file of the next timeline, and restarts
streaming from the new timeline by issuing a new START_STREAMING command.
When pg_receivexlog crosses a timeline, it leaves the .partial suffix on the
last segment on the old timeline. This helps you to tell apart a partial
segment left in the directory because of a timeline switch, and a completed
segment. If you just follow a single server, it won't make a difference, but
it can be significant in more complicated scenarios where new WAL is still
generated on the old timeline.
This includes two small changes to the streaming replication protocol:
First, when you reach the end of timeline while streaming, the server now
sends the TLI of the next timeline in the server's history to the client.
pg_receivexlog uses that as the next timeline, so that it doesn't need to
parse the timeline history file like a standby server does. Second, when
BASE_BACKUP command sends the begin and end WAL positions, it now also sends
the timeline IDs corresponding the positions.
The patch that turned XLogRecPtr into a uint64 inadvertently changed the
on-disk format of GiST indexes, because the NSN field in the GiST page
opaque is an XLogRecPtr. That breaks pg_upgrade. Revert the format of that
field back to the two-field struct that XLogRecPtr was before. This is the
same we did to LSNs in the page header to avoid changing on-disk format.
Bump catversion, as this invalidates any existing GiST indexes built on
9.3devel.
This new facility can not only be used by xlog.c to carry out crash
recovery, but also by external programs. By supplying a function to
read XLog pages from somewhere, all the WAL reading can be used for
completely different purposes.
For the standard backend use, the behavior should be pretty much the
same as previously. As for non-backend programs, an hypothetical
pg_xlogdump program is now closer to reality, but some more backend
support is still necessary.
This patch was originally submitted by Andres Freund in a different
form, but Heikki Linnakangas opted for and authored another design of
the concept. Andres has advanced the patch since Heikki's initial
version. Review and some (mostly cosmetics) changes by me.
Historically we've used a couple of very ad-hoc fudge factors to try to
get the right results when indexes of different sizes would satisfy a
query with the same number of index leaf tuples being visited. In
commit 21a39de580 I tweaked one of these
fudge factors, with results that proved disastrous for larger indexes.
Commit bf01e34b55 fudged it some more,
but still with not a lot of principle behind it.
What seems like a better way to address these issues is to explicitly model
index-descent costs, since that's what's really at stake when considering
diferent indexes with similar leaf-page-level costs. We tried that once
long ago, and found that charging random_page_cost per page descended
through was way too much, because upper btree levels tend to stay in cache
in real-world workloads. However, there's still CPU costs to think about,
and the previous fudge factors can be seen as a crude attempt to account
for those costs. So this patch replaces those fudge factors with explicit
charges for the number of tuple comparisons needed to descend the index
tree, plus a small charge per page touched in the descent. The cost
multipliers are chosen so that the resulting charges are in the vicinity of
the historical (pre-9.2) fudge factors for indexes of up to about a million
tuples, while not ballooning unreasonably beyond that, as the old fudge
factor did (even more so in 9.2).
To make this work accurately for btree indexes, add some code that allows
extraction of the known root-page height from a btree. There's no
equivalent number readily available for other index types, but we can use
the log of the number of index pages as an approximate substitute.
This seems like too much of a behavioral change to risk back-patching,
but it should improve matters going forward. In 9.2 I'll just revert
the fudge-factor change.
If you take a base backup from a standby server with "pg_basebackup -X
fetch", and the timeline switches while the backup is being taken, the
backup used to fail with an error "requested WAL segment %s has already
been removed". This is because the server-side code that sends over the
required WAL files would not construct the WAL filename with the correct
timeline after a switch.
Fix that by using readdir() to scan pg_xlog for all the WAL segments in the
range, regardless of timeline.
Also, include all timeline history files in the backup, if taken with
"-X fetch". That fixes another related bug: If a timeline switch happened
just before the backup was initiated in a standby, the WAL segment
containing the initial checkpoint record contains WAL from the older
timeline too. Recovery will not accept that without a timeline history file
that lists the older timeline.
Backpatch to 9.2. Versions prior to that were not affected as you could not
take a base backup from a standby before 9.2.
The cascading standby patch in 9.2 changed the way WAL files are treated
when restored from the archive. Before, they were restored under a temporary
filename, and not kept in pg_xlog, but after the patch, they were copied
under pg_xlog. This is necessary for a cascading standby to find them, but
it also means that if the archive goes offline and a standby is restarted,
it can recover back to where it was using the files in pg_xlog. It also
means that if you take an offline backup from a standby server, it includes
all the required WAL files in pg_xlog.
However, the same change was not made to timeline history files, so if the
WAL segment containing the checkpoint record contains a timeline switch, you
will still get an error if you try to restart recovery without the archive,
or recover from an offline backup taken from the standby.
With this patch, timeline history files restored from archive are copied
into pg_xlog like WAL files are, so that pg_xlog contains all the files
required to recover. This is a corner-case pre-existing issue in 9.2, but
even more important in master where it's possible for a standby to follow a
timeline switch through streaming replication. To make that possible, the
timeline history files must be present in pg_xlog.
This gets rid of XLByteLT, XLByteLE, XLByteEQ and XLByteAdvance.
These were useful for brevity when XLogRecPtrs were split in
xlogid/xrecoff; but now that they are simple uint64's, they are just
clutter. The only downside to making this change would be ease of
backporting patches, but that has been negated by other substantive
changes to the involved code anyway. The clarity of simpler expressions
makes the change worthwhile.
Most of the changes are mechanical, but in a couple of places, the patch
author chose to invert the operator sense, making the code flow more
logical (and more in line with preceding comments).
Author: Andres Freund
Eyeballed by Dimitri Fontaine and Alvaro Herrera
Most of the time, the last replayed record comes from the recovery target
timeline, but there is a corner case where it makes a difference. When
the startup process scans for a new timeline, and decides to change recovery
target timeline, there is a window where the recovery target TLI has already
been bumped, but there are no WAL segments from the new timeline in pg_xlog
yet. For example, if we have just replayed up to point 0/30002D8, on
timeline 1, there is a WAL file called 000000010000000000000003 in pg_xlog
that contains the WAL up to that point. When recovery switches recovery
target timeline to 2, a walsender can immediately try to read WAL from
0/30002D8, from timeline 2, so it will try to open WAL file
000000020000000000000003. However, that doesn't exist yet - the startup
process hasn't copied that file from the archive yet nor has the walreceiver
streamed it yet, so walsender fails with error "requested WAL segment
000000020000000000000003 has already been removed". That's harmless, in that
the standby will try to reconnect later and by that time the segment is
already created, but error messages that should be ignored are not good.
To fix that, have walsender track the TLI of the last replayed record,
instead of the recovery target timeline. That way walsender will not try to
read anything from timeline 2, until the WAL segment has been created and at
least one record has been replayed from it. The recovery target timeline is
now xlog.c's internal affair, it doesn't need to be exposed in shared memory
anymore.
This fixes the error reported by Thom Brown. depesz the same error message,
but I'm not sure if this fixes his scenario.
Before this patch, streaming replication would refuse to start replicating
if the timeline in the primary doesn't exactly match the standby. The
situation where it doesn't match is when you have a master, and two
standbys, and you promote one of the standbys to become new master.
Promoting bumps up the timeline ID, and after that bump, the other standby
would refuse to continue.
There's significantly more timeline related logic in streaming replication
now. First of all, when a standby connects to primary, it will ask the
primary for any timeline history files that are missing from the standby.
The missing files are sent using a new replication command TIMELINE_HISTORY,
and stored in standby's pg_xlog directory. Using the timeline history files,
the standby can follow the latest timeline present in the primary
(recovery_target_timeline='latest'), just as it can follow new timelines
appearing in an archive directory.
START_REPLICATION now takes a TIMELINE parameter, to specify exactly which
timeline to stream WAL from. This allows the standby to request the primary
to send over WAL that precedes the promotion. The replication protocol is
changed slightly (in a backwards-compatible way although there's little hope
of streaming replication working across major versions anyway), to allow
replication to stop when the end of timeline reached, putting the walsender
back into accepting a replication command.
Many thanks to Amit Kapila for testing and reviewing various versions of
this patch.
This allows us to do some more rigorous sanity checking for various
incorrect point-in-time recovery scenarios, and provides more information
for debugging purposes. It will also come handy in the upcoming patch to
allow timeline switches to be replicated by streaming replication.
