before reporting a transaction committed. Data consistency is still
guaranteed (unlike setting fsync = off), but a crash may lose the effects
of the last few transactions. Patch by Simon, some editorialization by Tom.
This commit breaks any code that assumes that the mere act of forming a tuple
(without writing it to disk) does not "toast" any fields. While all available
regression tests pass, I'm not totally sure that we've fixed every nook and
cranny, especially in contrib.
Greg Stark with some help from Tom Lane
stale relcache init files (pg_internal.init), and there is no mechanism for
updating them during WAL replay. Easiest solution is just to delete the init
files at conclusion of startup, and let the first backend started in each
database take care of rebuilding the init file. Simon Riggs and Tom Lane.
Back-patched to 8.1. Arguably this should be fixed in 8.0 too, but it would
require significantly more code since 8.0 has no handy startup-time scan of
pg_database to piggyback on. Manual solution of the problem is possible
in 8.0 (just delete the pg_internal.init files before starting WAL replay),
so that may be a sufficient answer.
in PITR scenarios. We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases. Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId. Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done. Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database. initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs. Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.
To this end, add a couple of columns to pg_class, relminxid and relvacuumxid,
based on which we calculate the pg_database columns after each vacuum.
We now force all databases to be vacuumed, even template ones. A backend
noticing too old a database (meaning pg_database.datminxid is in danger of
falling behind Xid wraparound) will signal the postmaster, which in turn will
start an autovacuum iteration to process the offending database. In principle
this is only there to cope with frozen (non-connectable) databases without
forcing users to set them to connectable, but it could force regular user
database to go through a database-wide vacuum at any time. Maybe we should
warn users about this somehow. Of course the real solution will be to use
autovacuum all the time ;-)
There are some additional improvements we could have in this area: for example
the vacuum code could be smarter about not updating pg_database for each table
when called by autovacuum, and do it only once the whole autovacuum iteration
is done.
I updated the system catalogs documentation, but I didn't modify the
maintenance section. Also having some regression tests for this would be nice
but it's not really a very straightforward thing to do.
Catalog version bumped due to system catalog changes.
The former approach used ExclusiveLock on pg_database, which being a
cluster-wide lock meant only one of these operations could proceed at
a time; worse, it also blocked all incoming connections in ReverifyMyDatabase.
Now that we have LockSharedObject(), we can use locks of different types
applied to databases considered as objects. This allows much more
flexible management of the interlocking: two CREATE DATABASEs need not
block each other, and need not block connections except to the template
database being used. Similarly DROP DATABASE doesn't block unrelated
operations. The locking used in flatfiles.c is also much narrower in
scope than before. Per recent proposal.
comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory. Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).
Backpatch to 8.1.X.
delay and limit, both as global GUCs and as table-specific entries in
pg_autovacuum. stats_reset_on_server_start is now OFF by default,
but a reset is forced if we did WAL replay. XID-wrap vacuums do not
ANALYZE, but do FREEZE if it's a template database. Alvaro Herrera
chdir into PGDATA and subsequently use relative paths instead of absolute
paths to access all files under PGDATA. This seems to give a small
performance improvement, and it should make the system more robust
against naive DBAs doing things like moving a database directory that
has a live postmaster in it. Per recent discussion.
role memberships; make superuser/createrole distinction do something
useful; fix some locking and CommandCounterIncrement issues; prevent
creation of loops in the membership graph.
and pg_auth_members. There are still many loose ends to finish in this
patch (no documentation, no regression tests, no pg_dump support for
instance). But I'm going to commit it now anyway so that Alvaro can
make some progress on shared dependencies. The catalog changes should
be pretty much done.
indexes. Replace all heap_openr and index_openr calls by heap_open
and index_open. Remove runtime lookups of catalog OID numbers in
various places. Remove relcache's support for looking up system
catalogs by name. Bulky but mostly very boring patch ...
indexes. Extend the macros in include/catalog/*.h to carry the info
about hand-assigned OIDs, and adjust the genbki script and bootstrap
code to make the relations actually get those OIDs. Remove the small
number of RelOid_pg_foo macros that we had in favor of a complete
set named like the catname.h and indexing.h macros. Next phase will
get rid of internal use of names for looking up catalogs and indexes;
but this completes the changes forcing an initdb, so it looks like a
good place to commit.
Along the way, I made the shared relations (pg_database etc) not be
'bootstrap' relations any more, so as to reduce the number of hardwired
entries and simplify changing those relations in future. I'm not
sure whether they ever really needed to be handled as bootstrap
relations, but it seems to work fine to not do so now.
in favor of looking at the flat file copy of pg_database during backend
startup. This should finally eliminate the various corner cases in which
backend startup fails unexpectedly because it isn't able to distinguish
live and dead tuples in pg_database. Simplify locking on pg_database
to be similar to the rules used with pg_shadow and pg_group, and eliminate
FlushRelationBuffers operations that were used only to reduce the odds
of failure of GetRawDatabaseInfo.
initdb forced due to addition of a trigger to pg_database.
during flat-file writing. The only difference is that SnapshotSelf
would consider tuples of the 'current command' within the current
transaction as valid, where SnapshotNow wouldn't. We can eliminate
the need for this with one extra CommandCounterIncrement call before
we start reading the catalogs.
file now identifies group members by usesysid not name; this avoids
needing to depend on SearchSysCache which we can't use during startup.
(The old representation was entirely broken anyway, since we did not
regenerate the file following RENAME USER.) It's only a 95% solution
because if the group membership list is big enough to be toasted out
of line, we cannot read it during startup. I think this will do for
the moment, until we have time to implement the planned pg_role
replacement for pg_group.
in GetNewTransactionId(). Since the limit value has to be computed
before we run any real transactions, this requires adding code to database
startup to scan pg_database and determine the oldest datfrozenxid.
This can conveniently be combined with the first stage of an attack on
the problem that the 'flat file' copies of pg_shadow and pg_group are
not properly updated during WAL recovery. The code I've added to
startup resides in a new file src/backend/utils/init/flatfiles.c, and
it is responsible for rewriting the flat files as well as initializing
the XID wraparound limit value. This will eventually allow us to get
rid of GetRawDatabaseInfo too, but we'll need an initdb so we can add
a trigger to pg_database.