This patch introduces INCLUDE clause to index definition. This clause
specifies a list of columns which will be included as a non-key part in
the index. The INCLUDE columns exist solely to allow more queries to
benefit from index-only scans. Also, such columns don't need to have
appropriate operator classes. Expressions are not supported as INCLUDE
columns since they cannot be used in index-only scans.
Index access methods supporting INCLUDE are indicated by amcaninclude flag
in IndexAmRoutine. For now, only B-tree indexes support INCLUDE clause.
In B-tree indexes INCLUDE columns are truncated from pivot index tuples
(tuples located in non-leaf pages and high keys). Therefore, B-tree indexes
now might have variable number of attributes. This patch also provides
generic facility to support that: pivot tuples contain number of their
attributes in t_tid.ip_posid. Free 13th bit of t_info is used for indicating
that. This facility will simplify further support of index suffix truncation.
The changes of above are backward-compatible, pg_upgrade doesn't need special
handling of B-tree indexes for that.
Bump catalog version
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with contribition by Alexander Korotkov and me
Reviewed by: Peter Geoghegan, Tomas Vondra, Antonin Houska, Jeff Janes,
David Rowley, Alexander Korotkov
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/56168952.4010101@postgrespro.ru
Add page-level predicate locking, due to gist's code organization, patch seems
close to trivial: add check before page changing, add predicate lock before page
scanning. Although choosing right place to check is not simple: it should not
be called during index build, it should support insertion of new downlink and so
on.
Author: Shubham Barai with editorization by me and Alexander Korotkov
Reviewed by: Alexander Korotkov, Andrey Borodin, me
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CALxAEPtdcANpw5ePU3LvnTP8HCENFw6wygupQAyNBgD-sG3h0g@mail.gmail.com
Previously, it just returned the heap tuple count, which might be only an
estimate, and would be completely the wrong thing if the index is partial.
Since this function scans every index page anyway to find free pages,
it's practically free to count the surviving index tuples. Let's do that
and return an accurate count.
This is easily visible as a wrong reltuples value for a partial GiST
index following VACUUM, so back-patch to all supported branches.
Andrey Borodin, reviewed by Michail Nikolaev
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/151956654251.6915.675951950408204404.pgcf@coridan.postgresql.org
To make this work, tuplesort.c and logtape.c must also support
parallelism, so this patch adds that infrastructure and then applies
it to the particular case of parallel btree index builds. Testing
to date shows that this can often be 2-3x faster than a serial
index build.
The model for deciding how many workers to use is fairly primitive
at present, but it's better than not having the feature. We can
refine it as we get more experience.
Peter Geoghegan with some help from Rushabh Lathia. While Heikki
Linnakangas is not an author of this patch, he wrote other patches
without which this feature would not have been possible, and
therefore the release notes should possibly credit him as an author
of this feature. Reviewed by Claudio Freire, Heikki Linnakangas,
Thomas Munro, Tels, Amit Kapila, me.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAM3SWZQKM=Pzc=CAHzRixKjp2eO5Q0Jg1SoFQqeXFQ647JiwqQ@mail.gmail.com
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAH2-Wz=AxWqDoVvGU7dq856S4r6sJAj6DBn7VMtigkB33N5eyg@mail.gmail.com
As src/backend/access/transam/README says, PageGetLSN may only be called
by processes holding either exclusive lock on buffer, or a shared lock
on buffer plus buffer header lock. Therefore any place that only holds
a shared buffer lock must use BufferGetLSNAtomic instead of PageGetLSN,
which internally obtains buffer header lock prior to reading the LSN.
A few callsites failed to comply with this rule. This was detected by
running all tests under a new (not committed) assertion that verifies
PageGetLSN locking contract. All but one of the callsites that failed
the assertion are fixed by this patch. Remaining callsites were
inspected manually and determined not to need any change.
The exception (unfixed callsite) is in TestForOldSnapshot, which only
has a Page argument, making it impossible to access the corresponding
Buffer from it. Fixing that seems a much larger patch that will have to
be done separately; and that's just as well, since it was only
introduced in 9.6 and other bugs are much older.
Some of these bugs are ancient; backpatch all the way back to 9.3.
Authors: Jacob Champion, Asim Praveen, Ashwin Agrawal
Reviewed-by: Michaël Paquier
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CABAq_6GXgQDVu3u12mK9O5Xt5abBZWQ0V40LZCE+oUf95XyNFg@mail.gmail.com
The lower case spellings are C and C++ standard and are used in most
parts of the PostgreSQL sources. The upper case spellings are only used
in some files/modules. So standardize on the standard spellings.
The APIs for ICU, Perl, and Windows define their own TRUE and FALSE, so
those are left as is when using those APIs.
In code comments, we use the lower-case spelling for the C concepts and
keep the upper-case spelling for the SQL concepts.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
The preceding patch allowed us to remove useless GiST support functions.
This patch actually does that for all the no-op cases in the core GiST
code. This buys us whatever performance gain is to be had, and more
importantly exercises the preceding patch.
There remain no-op functions in the contrib GiST opclasses, but those
will take more work to remove.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAJEAwVELVx9gYscpE=Be6iJxvdW5unZ_LkcAaVNSeOwvdwtD=A@mail.gmail.com
There are common use-cases in which the compress and/or decompress
functions can be omitted, with the result being that we make no
data transformation when storing or retrieving index values.
Previously, you had to provide a no-op function anyway, but this
patch allows such opclass support functions to be omitted.
Furthermore, if the compress function is omitted, then the core code
knows that the stored representation is the same as the original data.
This means we can allow index-only scans without requiring a fetch
function to be provided either. Previously you had to provide a
no-op fetch function if you wanted IOS to work.
This reportedly provides a small performance benefit in such cases,
but IMO the real reason for doing it is just to reduce the amount of
useless boilerplate code that has to be written for GiST opclasses.
Andrey Borodin, reviewed by Dmitriy Sarafannikov
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAJEAwVELVx9gYscpE=Be6iJxvdW5unZ_LkcAaVNSeOwvdwtD=A@mail.gmail.com
This is a mechanical change in preparation for a later commit that
will change the layout of TupleDesc. Introducing a macro to abstract
the details of where attributes are stored will allow us to change
that in separate step and revise it in future.
Author: Thomas Munro, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0ZtQ-SpsgCyzzYpsXS6e=kZWqk3g5Ygn3MDV7A8dabUA@mail.gmail.com
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Change pg_bsd_indent to follow upstream rules for placement of comments
to the right of code, and remove pgindent hack that caused comments
following #endif to not obey the general rule.
Commit e3860ffa4dd0dad0dd9eea4be9cc1412373a8c89 wasn't actually using
the published version of pg_bsd_indent, but a hacked-up version that
tried to minimize the amount of movement of comments to the right of
code. The situation of interest is where such a comment has to be
moved to the right of its default placement at column 33 because there's
code there. BSD indent has always moved right in units of tab stops
in such cases --- but in the previous incarnation, indent was working
in 8-space tab stops, while now it knows we use 4-space tabs. So the
net result is that in about half the cases, such comments are placed
one tab stop left of before. This is better all around: it leaves
more room on the line for comment text, and it means that in such
cases the comment uniformly starts at the next 4-space tab stop after
the code, rather than sometimes one and sometimes two tabs after.
Also, ensure that comments following #endif are indented the same
as comments following other preprocessor commands such as #else.
That inconsistency turns out to have been self-inflicted damage
from a poorly-thought-through post-indent "fixup" in pgindent.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
Remove some gratuituous message differences by making the AM name
previously embedded in each message be a %s instead. While at it, get
rid of terminology that's unclear and unnecessary in one message.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170523001557.bq2hbq7hxyvyw62q@alvherre.pgsql
GiST's getNextNearest() function attempts to pfree the previously-returned
tuple if any (that is, scan->xs_hitup in HEAD, or scan->xs_itup in older
branches). However, if we are rescanning a plan node after ending a
previous scan early, those tuple pointers could be pointing to garbage,
because they would be pointing into the scan's pageDataCxt or queueCxt
which has been reset. In a debug build this reliably results in a crash,
although I think it might sometimes accidentally fail to fail in
production builds.
To fix, clear the pointer field anyplace we reset a context it might
be pointing into. This may be overkill --- I think probably only the
queueCxt case is involved in this bug, so that resetting in gistrescan()
would be sufficient --- but dangling pointers are generally bad news,
so let's avoid them.
Another plausible answer might be to just not bother with the pfree in
getNextNearest(). The reconstructed tuples would go away anyway in the
context resets, and I'm far from convinced that freeing them a bit earlier
really saves anything meaningful. I'll stick with the original logic in
this patch, but if we find more problems in the same area we should
consider that approach.
Per bug #14641 from Denis Smirnov. Back-patch to 9.5 where this
logic was introduced.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20170504072034.24366.57688@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Further fallout from commit c29aff959: there are some files that need
<float.h>, and were getting it from datatype/timestamp.h, but it was not
apparent in my (tgl's) testing because the requirement for <float.h>
exists only on certain Windows toolchains.
Report and patch by David Rowley.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAKJS1f-BHceaFzZScFapDV48gUVM2CAOBfhkgffdqXzFb+kwew@mail.gmail.com
Previously, only IndexTuple format was supported for the output data of
an index-only scan. This is fine for btree, which is just returning a
verbatim index tuple anyway. It's not so fine for SP-GiST, which can
return reconstructed data that's much larger than a page.
To fix, extend the index AM API so that index-only scan data can be
returned in either HeapTuple or IndexTuple format. There's other ways
we could have done it, but this way avoids an API break for index AMs
that aren't concerned with the issue, and it costs little except a couple
more fields in IndexScanDescs.
I changed both GiST and SP-GiST to use the HeapTuple method. I'm not
very clear on whether GiST can reconstruct data that's too large for an
IndexTuple, but that seems possible, and it's not much of a code change to
fix.
Per a complaint from Vik Fearing. Reviewed by Jason Li.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/49527f79-530d-0bfe-3dad-d183596afa92@2ndquadrant.fr
In combination with 569174f1be92be93f5366212cc46960d28a5c5cd, which
taught the btree AM how to perform parallel index scans, this allows
parallel index scan plans on btree indexes. This infrastructure
should be general enough to support parallel index scans for other
index AMs as well, if someone updates them to support parallel
scans.
Amit Kapila, reviewed and tested by Anastasia Lubennikova, Tushar
Ahuja, and Haribabu Kommi, and me.
The xlog-specific headers need to be included in both frontend code -
specifically, pg_waldump - and the backend, but the remainder of the
private headers for each index are only needed by the backend. By
splitting the xlog stuff out into separate headers, pg_waldump pulls
in fewer backend headers, which is a good thing.
Patch by me, reviewed by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund, per a
complaint from Dilip Kumar.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZ=F=GkxV0YEv-A8tb+AEGy_Qa7GSiJ8deBKFATnzfEug@mail.gmail.com
It's always been possible for index AMs to cache data across successive
amgettuple calls within a single SQL command: the IndexScanDesc.opaque
field is meant for precisely that. However, no comparable facility
exists for amortizing setup work across successive aminsert calls.
This patch adds such a feature and teaches GIN, GIST, and BRIN to use it
to amortize catalog lookups they'd previously been doing on every call.
(The other standard index AMs keep everything they need in the relcache,
so there's little to improve there.)
For GIN, the overall improvement in a statement that inserts many rows
can be as much as 10%, though it seems a bit less for the other two.
In addition, this makes a really significant difference in runtime
for CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS tests, since in those builds the repeated
catalog lookups are vastly more expensive.
The reason this has been hard up to now is that the aminsert function is
not passed any useful place to cache per-statement data. What I chose to
do is to add suitable fields to struct IndexInfo and pass that to aminsert.
That's not widening the index AM API very much because IndexInfo is already
within the ken of ambuild; in fact, by passing the same info to aminsert
as to ambuild, this is really removing an inconsistency in the AM API.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/27568.1486508680@sss.pgh.pa.us
When the new GUC wal_consistency_checking is set to a non-empty value,
it triggers recording of additional full-page images, which are
compared on the standby against the results of applying the WAL record
(without regard to those full-page images). Allowable differences
such as hints are masked out, and the resulting pages are compared;
any difference results in a FATAL error on the standby.
Kuntal Ghosh, based on earlier patches by Michael Paquier and Heikki
Linnakangas. Extensively reviewed and revised by Michael Paquier and
by me, with additional reviews and comments from Amit Kapila, Álvaro
Herrera, Simon Riggs, and Peter Eisentraut.
This patch doesn't actually make any index AM parallel-aware, but it
provides the necessary functions at the AM layer to do so.
Rahila Syed, Amit Kapila, Robert Haas
Gen_fmgrtab.pl creates a new file fmgrprotos.h, which contains
prototypes for all functions registered in pg_proc.h. This avoids
having to manually maintain these prototypes across a random variety of
header files. It also automatically enforces a correct function
signature, and since there are warnings about missing prototypes, it
will detect functions that are defined but not registered in
pg_proc.h (or otherwise used).
Reviewed-by: Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com>
The GiST search queue is implemented as a pairing heap rather than as
Red-Black Tree, since 9.5 (commit e7032610). I neglected these comments
in that commit.
PageIndexTupleOverwrite performs approximately the same function as
PageIndexTupleDelete (or PageIndexDeleteNoCompact) followed by PageAddItem
targeting the same item pointer offset. But in the case where the new
tuple is the same size as the old, it avoids shuffling other data around on
the page, because the new tuple is placed where the old one was rather than
being appended to the end of the page. This has been shown to provide a
substantial speedup for some GiST use-cases.
Also, this change allows some API simplifications: we can get rid of
the rather klugy and error-prone PAI_ALLOW_FAR_OFFSET flag for
PageAddItemExtended, since that was used only to cover a corner case
for BRIN that's better expressed by using PageIndexTupleOverwrite.
Note that this patch causes a rather subtle WAL incompatibility: the
physical page content change represented by certain WAL records is now
different than it was before, because while the tuples have the same
itempointer line numbers, the tuples themselves are in different places.
I have not bumped the WAL version number because I think it doesn't matter
unless you are trying to do bitwise comparisons of original and replayed
pages, and in any case we're early in a devel cycle and there will probably
be more WAL changes before v10 gets out the door.
There is probably room to make use of PageIndexTupleOverwrite in SP-GiST
and GIN too, but that is left for a future patch.
Andrey Borodin, reviewed by Anastasia Lubennikova, whacked around a bit
by me
Discussion: <CAJEAwVGQjGGOj6mMSgMwGvtFd5Kwe6VFAxY=uEPZWMDjzbn4VQ@mail.gmail.com>
I found that half a dozen (nearly 5%) of our AllocSetContextCreate calls
had typos in the context-sizing parameters. While none of these led to
especially significant problems, they did create minor inefficiencies,
and it's now clear that expecting people to copy-and-paste those calls
accurately is not a great idea. Let's reduce the risk of future errors
by introducing single macros that encapsulate the common use-cases.
Three such macros are enough to cover all but two special-purpose contexts;
those two calls can be left as-is, I think.
While this patch doesn't in itself improve matters for third-party
extensions, it doesn't break anything for them either, and they can
gradually adopt the simplified notation over time.
In passing, change TopMemoryContext to use the default allocation
parameters. Formerly it could only be extended 8K at a time. That was
probably reasonable when this code was written; but nowadays we create
many more contexts than we did then, so that it's not unusual to have a
couple hundred K in TopMemoryContext, even without considering various
dubious code that sticks other things there. There seems no good reason
not to let it use growing blocks like most other contexts.
Back-patch to 9.6, mostly because that's still close enough to HEAD that
it's easy to do so, and keeping the branches in sync can be expected to
avoid some future back-patching pain. The bugs fixed by these changes
don't seem to be significant enough to justify fixing them further back.
Discussion: <21072.1472321324@sss.pgh.pa.us>
With Asserts off, these variables are set but never used, resulting
in warnings from pickier compilers. Fix that with our standard solution.
Per report from Jeff Janes.
Per discussion, we should provide such functions to replace the lost
ability to discover AM properties by inspecting pg_am (cf commit
65c5fcd35). The added functionality is also meant to displace any code
that was looking directly at pg_index.indoption, since we'd rather not
believe that the bit meanings in that field are part of any client API
contract.
As future-proofing, define the SQL API to not assume that properties that
are currently AM-wide or index-wide will remain so unless they logically
must be; instead, expose them only when inquiring about a specific index
or even specific index column. Also provide the ability for an index
AM to override the behavior.
In passing, document pg_am.amtype, overlooked in commit 473b93287.
Andrew Gierth, with kibitzing by me and others
Discussion: <87mvl5on7n.fsf@news-spur.riddles.org.uk>
GiST index build could go into an infinite loop when presented with boxes
(or points, circles or polygons) containing NaN component values. This
happened essentially because the code assumed that x == x is true for any
"double" value x; but it's not true for NaNs. The looping behavior was not
the only problem though: we also attempted to sort the items using simple
double comparisons. Since NaNs violate the trichotomy law, qsort could
(in principle at least) get arbitrarily confused and mess up the sorting of
ordinary values as well as NaNs. And we based splitting choices on box size
calculations that could produce NaNs, again resulting in undesirable
behavior.
To fix, replace all comparisons of doubles in this logic with
float8_cmp_internal, which is NaN-aware and is careful to sort NaNs
consistently, higher than any non-NaN. Also rearrange the box size
calculation to not produce NaNs; instead it should produce an infinity
for a box with NaN on one side and not-NaN on the other.
I don't by any means claim that this solves all problems with NaNs in
geometric values, but it should at least make GiST index insertion work
reliably with such data. It's likely that the index search side of things
still needs some work, and probably regular geometric operations too.
But with this patch we're laying down a convention for how such cases
ought to behave.
Per bug #14238 from Guang-Dih Lei. Back-patch to 9.2; the code used before
commit 7f3bd86843e5aad8 is quite different and doesn't lock up on my simple
test case, nor on the submitter's dataset.
Report: <20160708151747.1426.60150@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Discussion: <28685.1468246504@sss.pgh.pa.us>
The reverted changes were intended to force a choice of whether any
newly-added BufferGetPage() calls needed to be accompanied by a
test of the snapshot age, to support the "snapshot too old"
feature. Such an accompanying test is needed in about 7% of the
cases, where the page is being used as part of a scan rather than
positioning for other purposes (such as DML or vacuuming). The
additional effort required for back-patching, and the doubt whether
the intended benefit would really be there, have indicated it is
best just to rely on developers to do the right thing based on
comments and existing usage, as we do with many other conventions.
This change should have little or no effect on generated executable
code.
Motivated by the back-patching pain of Tom Lane and Robert Haas
This feature is controlled by a new old_snapshot_threshold GUC. A
value of -1 disables the feature, and that is the default. The
value of 0 is just intended for testing. Above that it is the
number of minutes a snapshot can reach before pruning and vacuum
are allowed to remove dead tuples which the snapshot would
otherwise protect. The xmin associated with a transaction ID does
still protect dead tuples. A connection which is using an "old"
snapshot does not get an error unless it accesses a page modified
recently enough that it might not be able to produce accurate
results.
This is similar to the Oracle feature, and we use the same SQLSTATE
and error message for compatibility.
This patch is a no-op patch which is intended to reduce the chances
of failures of omission once the functional part of the "snapshot
too old" patch goes in. It adds parameters for snapshot, relation,
and an enum to specify whether the snapshot age check needs to be
done for the page at this point. This initial patch passes NULL
for the first two new parameters and BGP_NO_SNAPSHOT_TEST for the
third. The follow-on patch will change the places where the test
needs to be made.
Now indexes (but only B-tree for now) can contain "extra" column(s) which
doesn't participate in index structure, they are just stored in leaf
tuples. It allows to use index only scan by using single index instead
of two or more indexes.
Author: Anastasia Lubennikova with minor editorializing by me
Reviewers: David Rowley, Peter Geoghegan, Jeff Janes
KNN GiST with recheck flag should return to executor the same type as ordering
operator, GiST detects this type by looking to return type of function which
implements ordering operator. But occasionally detecting code works after
replacing ordering operator function to distance support function.
Distance support function always returns float8, so, detecting code get float8
instead of actual return type of ordering operator.
Built-in opclasses don't have ordering operator which doesn't return
non-float8 value, so, tests are impossible here, at least now.
Backpatch to 9.5 where lozzy KNN was introduced.
Author: Alexander Korotkov
Report by: Artur Zakirov
Given the limited range of i, these shifts should not cause any
problem, but that apparently doesn't stop some compilers from
whining about them.
David Rowley
The amvalidate functions added in commit 65c5fcd353a859da were on the
crude side. Improve them in a few ways:
* Perform signature checking for operators and support functions.
* Apply more thorough checks for missing operators and functions,
where possible.
* Instead of reporting problems as ERRORs, report most problems as INFO
messages and make the amvalidate function return FALSE. This allows
more than one problem to be discovered per run.
* Report object names rather than OIDs, and work a bit harder on making
the messages understandable.
Also, remove a few more opr_sanity regression test queries that are
now superseded by the amvalidate checks.
The conventions specified by the GiST SGML documentation were widely
ignored. For example, the strategy-number argument for "consistent" and
"distance" functions is specified to be a smallint, but most of the
built-in support functions declared it as an integer, and for that matter
the core code passed it using Int32GetDatum not Int16GetDatum. None of
that makes any real difference at runtime, but it's quite confusing for
newcomers to the code, and it makes it very hard to write an amvalidate()
function that checks support function signatures. So let's try to instill
some consistency here.
Another similar issue is that the "query" argument is not of a single
well-defined type, but could have different types depending on the strategy
(corresponding to search operators with different righthand-side argument
types). Some of the functions threw up their hands and declared the query
argument as being of "internal" type, which surely isn't right ("any" would
have been more appropriate); but the majority position seemed to be to
declare it as being of the indexed data type, corresponding to a search
operator with both input types the same. So I've specified a convention
that that's what to do always.
Also, the result of the "union" support function actually must be of the
index's storage type, but the documentation suggested declaring it to
return "internal", and some of the functions followed that. Standardize
on telling the truth, instead.
Similarly, standardize on declaring the "same" function's inputs as
being of the storage type, not "internal".
Also, somebody had forgotten to add the "recheck" argument to both
the documentation of the "distance" support function and all of their
SQL declarations, even though the C code was happily using that argument.
Clean that up too.
Fix up some other omissions in the docs too, such as documenting that
union's second input argument is vestigial.
So far as the errors in core function declarations go, we can just fix
pg_proc.h and bump catversion. Adjusting the erroneous declarations in
contrib modules is more debatable: in principle any change in those
scripts should involve an extension version bump, which is a pain.
However, since these changes are purely cosmetic and make no functional
difference, I think we can get away without doing that.
This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
