When re-reading an update involving both an old tuple and a new tuple from
disk, reorderbuffer.c was careless about whether the new tuple is suitably
aligned for direct access --- in general, it isn't. We'd missed seeing
this in the buildfarm because the contrib/test_decoding tests exercise this
code path only a few times, and by chance all of those cases have old
tuples with length a multiple of 4, which is usually enough to make the
access to the new tuple's t_len safe. For some still-not-entirely-clear
reason, however, Debian's sparc build gets a bus error, as reported by
Christoph Berg; perhaps it's assuming 8-byte alignment of the pointer?
The lack of previous field reports is probably because you need all of
these conditions to trigger a crash: an alignment-picky platform (not
Intel), a transaction large enough to spill to disk, an update within
that xact that changes a primary-key field and has an odd-length old tuple,
and of course logical decoding tracing the transaction.
Avoid the alignment assumption by using memcpy instead of fetching t_len
directly, and add a test case that exposes the crash on picky platforms.
Back-patch to 9.4 where the bug was introduced.
Discussion: <20160413094117.GC21485@msg.credativ.de>
Somehow I managed to flip the order of restoring old & new tuples when
de-spooling a change in a large transaction from disk. This happens to
only take effect when a change is spooled to disk which has old/new
versions of the tuple. That only is the case for UPDATEs where he
primary key changed or where replica identity is changed to FULL.
The tests didn't catch this because either spooled updates, or updates
that changed primary keys, were tested; not both at the same time.
Found while adding tests for the following commit.
Backpatch: 9.4, where logical decoding was added
test_decoding used fastgetattr() to extract column values. That's wrong
when decoding updates and deletes if a table's replica identity is set
to FULL and new columns have been added since the old version of the
tuple was created. Due to the lack of a crosscheck with the datum's
natts values an invalid value will be output, leading to errors or
worse.
Bug: #13470
Reported-By: Krzysztof Kotlarski
Discussion: 20150626100333.3874.90852@wrigleys.postgresql.org
Backpatch to 9.4, where the feature, including the bug, was added.
The regression tests for contrib/test_decoding regularly failed on
postgres instances that were very slow. Either because the hardware
itself was slow or because very expensive debugging options like
CLOBBER_CACHE_ALWAYS were used.
The reason they failed was just that some additional transactions were
decoded. Analyze and vacuum, triggered by autovac.
To fix just add a option to test_decoding to only display transactions
in which a change was actually displayed. That's not pretty because it
removes information from the tests; but better than constantly failing
tests in very likely harmless ways.
Backpatch to 9.4 where logical decoding was introduced.
Discussion: 20140629142511.GA26930@awork2.anarazel.de
pg_stat_replication shows connected replication clients. The ddl test case
never has any replication clients connected, so querying pg_stat_replication
is pointless. To check that a slot has been dropped correctly, query
pg_replication_slots instead.
Andres Freund
This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables. The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included. To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.
Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.
Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.