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.
