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.
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.
When descending the tree for an insert, and there are multiple equally good
pages we could insert to, make the choice in random. Previously, we would
always choose the tuple with lowest offset number. That meant that when two
non-leaf pages overlap - in the extreme case they might have exactly the same
key - all but the first such page went unused. That wasn't optimal for space
usage; if you deleted some tuples from the non-first pages, the space would
never be reused.
With this patch, the other pages are sometimes chosen too, although there's
still a heavy bias towards low-offset tuples, so that we don't lose cache
locality when doing a lot of inserts with similar keys.
Original idea by Alexander Korotkov, although this patch version was written
by me and copy-edited by Tom Lane.
This is mostly cosmetic, but it does eliminate a speculative portability
issue. The previous coding ignored the fact that sum_grow could easily
overflow (in fact, it could be summing multiple IEEE float infinities).
On a platform where that didn't guarantee to produce a positive result,
the code would misbehave. In any case, it was less than readable.
Every time the best-tuple-found-so-far changes, we need to reset all
the penalty values in which_grow[] to the penalties for the new best
tuple. The old code failed to do this, resulting in inferior index
quality.
The original patch from Alexander Korotkov was just two lines; I took
the liberty of fleshing that out by adding a bunch of comments that I
hope will make this logic easier for others to understand than it was
for me.
This simplifies code that needs to do arithmetic on XLogRecPtrs.
To avoid changing on-disk format of data pages, the LSN on data pages is
still stored in the old format. That should keep pg_upgrade happy. However,
we have XLogRecPtrs embedded in the control file, and in the structs that
are sent over the replication protocol, so this changes breaks compatibility
of pg_basebackup and server. I didn't do anything about this in this patch,
per discussion on -hackers, the right thing to do would to be to change the
replication protocol to be architecture-independent, so that you could use
a newer version of pg_receivexlog, for example, against an older server
version.
Use of a randomly chosen large value was never exactly graceful, and
now that there are penalty functions that are intentionally using infinity,
it doesn't seem like a good idea for null-vs-not-null to be using something
less.
When building a GiST index that doesn't fit in cache, buffers are attached
to some internal nodes in the index. This speeds up the build by avoiding
random I/O that would otherwise be needed to traverse all the way down the
tree to the find right leaf page for tuple.
Alexander Korotkov
Apparently sane-looking penalty code might return small negative values,
for example because of roundoff error. This will confuse places like
gistchoose(). Prevent problems by clamping negative penalty values to
zero. (Just to be really sure, I also made it force NaNs to zero.)
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Alexander Korotkov
Experimentation with contrib/btree_gist shows that the majority of the GIST
support functions potentially need collation information. Safest policy
seems to be to pass it to all of them, instead of making assumptions about
which ones could possibly need it.
cleanup stage to finish incomplete inserts or splits anymore. There was two
reasons for the cleanup step:
1. When a new tuple was inserted to a leaf page, the downlink in the parent
needed to be updated to contain (ie. to be consistent with) the new key.
Updating the parent in turn might require recursively updating the parent of
the parent. We now handle that by updating the parent while traversing down
the tree, so that when we insert the leaf tuple, all the parents are already
consistent with the new key, and the tree is consistent at every step.
2. When a page is split, we need to insert the downlink for the new right
page(s), and update the downlink for the original page to not include keys
that moved to the right page(s). We now handle that by setting a new flag,
F_FOLLOW_RIGHT, on the non-rightmost pages in the split. When that flag is
set, scans always follow the rightlink, regardless of the NSN mechanism used
to detect concurrent page splits. That way the tree is consistent right after
split, even though the downlink is still missing. This is very similar to the
way B-tree splits are handled. When the downlink is inserted in the parent,
the flag is cleared. To keep the insertion algorithm simple, when an
insertion sees an incomplete split, indicated by the F_FOLLOW_RIGHT flag, it
finishes the split before doing anything else.
These changes allow removing the whole "invalid tuple" mechanism, but I
retained the scan code to still follow invalid tuples correctly. While we
don't create any such tuples anymore, we want to handle them gracefully in
case you pg_upgrade a GiST index that has them. If we encounter any on an
insert, though, we just throw an error saying that you need to REINDEX.
The issue that got me into doing this is that if you did a checkpoint while
an insert or split was in progress, and the checkpoint finishes quickly so
that there is no WAL record related to the insert between RedoRecPtr and the
checkpoint record, recovery from that checkpoint would not know to finish
the incomplete insert. IOW, we have the same issue we solved with the
rm_safe_restartpoint mechanism during normal operation too. It's highly
unlikely to happen in practice, and this fix is far too large to backpatch,
so we're just going to live with in previous versions, but this refactoring
fixes it going forward.
With this patch, you don't get the annoying
'index "FOO" needs VACUUM or REINDEX to finish crash recovery' notices
anymore if you crash at an unfortunate moment.
temporary indexes are not WAL-logged. We used a constant LSN for temporary
indexes, on the assumption that we don't need to worry about concurrent page
splits in temporary indexes because they're only visible to the current
session. But that assumption is wrong, it's possible to insert rows and
split pages in the same session, while a scan is in progress. For example,
by opening a cursor and fetching some rows, and INSERTing new rows before
fetching some more.
Fix by generating fake increasing LSNs, used in place of real LSNs in
temporary GiST indexes.
a more complete framework for writing custom option processing routines
by user-defined access methods.
Catalog version bumped due to the general API changes, which are going to
affect user-defined "amoptions" routines.
free space information is stored in a dedicated FSM relation fork, with each
relation (except for hash indexes; they don't use FSM).
This eliminates the max_fsm_relations and max_fsm_pages GUC options; remove any
trace of them from the backend, initdb, and documentation.
Rewrite contrib/pg_freespacemap to match the new FSM implementation. Also
introduce a new variant of the get_raw_page(regclass, int4, int4) function in
contrib/pageinspect that let's you to return pages from any relation fork, and
a new fsm_page_contents() function to inspect the new FSM pages.
SizeOfPageHeaderData instead of sizeof(PageHeaderData) in places where that
makes the code clearer, and avoid casting between Page and PageHeader where
possible. Zdenek Kotala, with some additional cleanup by Heikki Linnakangas.
I did not apply the parts of the proposed patch that would have resulted in
slightly changing the on-disk format of hash indexes; it seems to me that's
not a win as long as there's any chance of having in-place upgrade for 8.4.
corresponding struct definitions. This allows other headers to avoid including
certain highly-loaded headers such as rel.h and relscan.h, instead using just
relcache.h, heapam.h or genam.h, which are more lightweight and thus cause less
unnecessary dependencies.
forks. XLogOpenRelation() and the associated light-weight relation cache in
xlogutils.c is gone, and XLogReadBuffer() now takes a RelFileNode as argument,
instead of Relation.
For functions that still need a Relation struct during WAL replay, there's a
new function called CreateFakeRelcacheEntry() that returns a fake entry like
XLogOpenRelation() used to.
unnecessary #include lines in it. Also, move some tuple routine prototypes and
macros to htup.h, which allows removal of heapam.h inclusion from some .c
files.
For this to work, a new header file access/sysattr.h needed to be created,
initially containing attribute numbers of system columns, for pg_dump usage.
While at it, make contrib ltree, intarray and hstore header files more
consistent with our header style.
columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer
generate extra index entries for the new version. Instead, index searches
follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version.
In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a
per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space.
VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however.
Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.
than two independent bits (one of which was never used in heap pages anyway,
or at least hadn't been in a very long time). This gives us flexibility to
add the HOT notions of redirected and dead item pointers without requiring
anything so klugy as magic values of lp_off and lp_len. The state values
are chosen so that for the states currently in use (pre-HOT) there is no
change in the physical representation.
index types can be reliably distinguished by examining the special space
on an index page. Per my earlier proposal, plus the realization that
there's no need for btree's vacuum cycle ID to cycle through every possible
16-bit value. Restricting its range a little costs nearly nothing and
eliminates the possibility of collisions.
Memo to self: remember to make bitmap indexes play along with this scheme,
assuming that patch ever gets accepted.
discussion (including making def_arg allow reserved words), add missed
opt_definition for UNIQUE case. Put the reloptions support code in a less
random place (I chose to make a new file access/common/reloptions.c).
Eliminate header inclusion creep. Make the index options functions safely
user-callable (seems like client apps might like to be able to test validity
of options before trying to make an index). Reduce overhead for normal case
with no options by allowing rd_options to be NULL. Fix some unmaintainably
klugy code, including getting rid of Natts_pg_class_fixed at long last.
Some stylistic cleanup too, and pay attention to keeping comments in sync
with code.
Documentation still needs work, though I did fix the omissions in
catalogs.sgml and indexam.sgml.
* new split algorithm (as proposed in http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2006-06/msg00254.php)
* possible call pickSplit() for second and below columns
* add spl_(l|r)datum_exists to GIST_SPLITVEC -
pickSplit should check its values to use already defined
spl_(l|r)datum for splitting. pickSplit should set
spl_(l|r)datum_exists to 'false' (if they was 'true') to
signal to caller about using spl_(l|r)datum.
* support for old pickSplit(): not very optimal
but correct split
* remove 'bytes' field from GISTENTRY: in any case size of
value is defined by it's type.
* split GIST_SPLITVEC to two structures: one for using in picksplit
and second - for internal use.
* some code refactoring
* support of subsplit to rtree opclasses
TODO: add support of subsplit to contrib modules
* some refactoring and simplify code int gistutil.c and gist.c
* now in some cases it can be called used-defined
picksplit method for non-first column in index, but here
is a place to do more.
* small fix of docs related to support NULL.
sections now isn't nested. All user-defined functions now is
called outside critsections. Small improvements in WAL
protocol.
TODO: improve XLOG replay
