The CatalogSnapshot was not plugged into SnapshotResetXmin()'s accounting
for whether MyPgXact->xmin could be cleared or advanced. In normal
transactions this was masked by the fact that the transaction snapshot
would be older, but during backend startup and certain utility commands
it was possible to re-use the CatalogSnapshot after MyPgXact->xmin had
been cleared, meaning that recently-deleted rows could be pruned even
though this snapshot could still see them, causing unexpected catalog
lookup failures. This effect appears to be the explanation for a recent
failure on buildfarm member piculet.
To fix, add the CatalogSnapshot to the RegisteredSnapshots heap whenever
it is valid.
In the previous logic, it was possible for the CatalogSnapshot to remain
valid across waits for client input, but with this change that would mean
it delays advance of global xmin in cases where it did not before. To
avoid possibly causing new table-bloat problems with clients that sit idle
for long intervals, add code to invalidate the CatalogSnapshot before
waiting for client input. (When the backend is busy, it's unlikely that
the CatalogSnapshot would be the oldest snap for very long, so we don't
worry about forcing early invalidation of it otherwise.)
In passing, remove the CatalogSnapshotStale flag in favor of using
"CatalogSnapshot != NULL" to represent validity, as we do for the other
special snapshots in snapmgr.c. And improve some obsolete comments.
No regression test because I don't know a deterministic way to cause this
failure. But the stress test shown in the original discussion provokes
"cache lookup failed for relation 1255" within a few dozen seconds for me.
Back-patch to 9.4 where MVCC catalog scans were introduced. (Note: it's
quite easy to produce similar failures with the same test case in branches
before 9.4. But MVCC catalog scans were supposed to fix that.)
Discussion: <16447.1478818294@sss.pgh.pa.us>
The sole caller expects NULL to be returned in such a case, so make
it so and document it.
Per reports from Andreas Seltenreich and Regina Obe. This doesn't
really fix their problem, as now their RETURNING queries will say
"ERROR: no known snapshots", but in any case this function should
not dump core in a reasonably-foreseeable situation.
Report: <87vazemeda.fsf@credativ.de>
Report: <20160807051854.1427.32414@wrigleys.postgresql.org>
Previously, we tested for MVCC snapshots to see whether they were too
old, but not TOAST snapshots, which can lead to complaints about missing
TOAST chunks if those chunks are subject to early pruning. Ideally,
the threshold lsn and timestamp for a TOAST snapshot would be that of
the corresponding MVCC snapshot, but since we have no way of deciding
which MVCC snapshot was used to fetch the TOAST pointer, use the oldest
active or registered snapshot instead.
Reported by Andres Freund, who also sketched out what the fix should
look like. Patch by me, reviewed by Amit Kapila.
If serialized_snapshot->subxcnt > 0 and serialized_snapshot->xcnt == 0,
the old coding would do the wrong thing and crash. This can happen
on standby servers.
Report by Andreas Seltenreich. Patch by Thomas Munro, reviewed by
Amit Kapila and tested by Andreas Seltenreich.
Since indexes are created without valid LSNs, an index created
while a snapshot older than old_snapshot_threshold existed could
cause queries to return incorrect results when those old snapshots
were used, if any relevant rows had been subject to early pruning
before the index was built. Prevent usage of a newly created index
until all such snapshots are released, for relations where this can
happen.
Questions about the interaction of "snapshot too old" with index
creation were initially raised by Andres Freund.
Reviewed by Robert Haas.
The "snapshot too old" condition was not being recognized when
using a copied snapshot, since the original timestamp and lsn were
not being passed along. Noticed when testing the combination of
"snapshot too old" with parallel query execution.
Limit maintenance of time to xid mapping to once per minute. At
least in the tested case this brings performance within 5% of when
the feature is off, compared to several times slower without this
patch.
While there, fix comments and whitespace.
Ants Aasma, with cosmetic adjustments suggested by Andres Freund
Reviewed by Kevin Grittner and Andres Freund
Hash indexes are not WAL-logged, and so do not maintain the LSN of
index pages. Since the "snapshot too old" feature counts on
detecting error conditions using the LSN of a table and all indexes
on it, this makes it impossible to safely do early vacuuming on any
table with a hash index, so add this to the tests for whether the
xid used to vacuum a table can be adjusted based on
old_snapshot_threshold.
While at it, add a paragraph to the docs for old_snapshot_threshold
which specifically mentions this and other aspects of the feature
which may otherwise surprise users.
Problem reported and patch reviewed by Amit Kapila
Without a few entries beyond old_snapshot_threshold, the lookup
would often fail, resulting in the more aggressive pruning or
vacuum being skipped often enough to matter. This was very clearly
shown by a python test script posted by Ants Aasma, and was likely
a factor in an earlier but somewhat less clear-cut test case posted
by Jeff Janes.
This patch makes no change to the logic, per se -- it just makes
the array of mapping entries big enough to make lookup misses based
on timing much less likely. An occasional miss is still possible
if a thread stalls for more than 10 minutes, but that does not
create any problem with correctness of behavior. Besides, if
things are so busy that a thread is stalling for more than 10
minutes, it is probably OK to skip the more aggressive cleanup at
that particular point in time.
It was incorrectly declared as a volatile pointer to a non-volatile
structure. Eliminate the OldSnapshotControl struct definition; it
is really not needed. Pointed out by Tom Lane.
While at it, add OldSnapshotControlData to pgindent's list of
structures.
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 fixes a bunch of somewhat pedantic warnings with new
compilers. Since by far the majority of other functions definitions use
the (void) style it just seems to be consistent to do so as well in the
remaining few places.
This does four basic things. First, it provides convenience routines
to coordinate the startup and shutdown of parallel workers. Second,
it synchronizes various pieces of state (e.g. GUCs, combo CID
mappings, transaction snapshot) from the parallel group leader to the
worker processes. Third, it prohibits various operations that would
result in unsafe changes to that state while parallelism is active.
Finally, it propagates events that would result in an ErrorResponse,
NoticeResponse, or NotifyResponse message being sent to the client
from the parallel workers back to the master, from which they can then
be sent on to the client.
Robert Haas, Amit Kapila, Noah Misch, Rushabh Lathia, Jeevan Chalke.
Suggestions and review from Andres Freund, Heikki Linnakangas, Noah
Misch, Simon Riggs, Euler Taveira, and Jim Nasby.
Currently, a backend will reset it's PGXACT->xmin value when it doesn't
have any registered snapshots left. That covered the common case that a
transaction in read committed mode runs several queries, one after each
other, as there would be no snapshots active between those queries.
However, if you hold cursors across each of the query, we didn't get a
chance to reset xmin.
To make that better, keep all the registered snapshots in a pairing heap,
ordered by xmin so that it's always quick to find the snapshot with the
smallest xmin. That allows us to advance PGXACT->xmin whenever the oldest
snapshot is deregistered, even if there are others still active.
Per discussion originally started by Jeff Davis back in 2009 and more
recently by Robert Haas.
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.
SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
versions of the row. In many cases, we work around this by requiring
DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
failures occur as a result. This commit doesn't change anything
related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
strength reductions in the future.
The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow. However, testing
of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
severe except under fairly extreme workloads. To mitigate those
problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
been processed. The catcache machinery already requires that
invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
than scanning the catalog at all. Thus, making snapshot reuse
dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
already subtly broken.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
When a relfilenode is created in this subtransaction or
a committed child transaction and it cannot otherwise
be seen by our own process, mark tuples committed ahead
of transaction commit for all COPY commands in same
transaction. If FREEZE specified on COPY
and pre-conditions met then rows will also be frozen.
Both options designed to avoid revisiting rows after commit,
increasing performance of subsequent commands after
data load and upgrade. pg_restore changes later.
Simon Riggs, review comments from Heikki Linnakangas, Noah Misch and design
input from Tom Lane, Robert Haas and Kevin Grittner
When (re) loading the typcache comparison cache for an enum type's values,
use an up-to-date MVCC snapshot, not the transaction's existing snapshot.
This avoids problems if we encounter an enum OID that was created since our
transaction started. Per report from Andres Freund and diagnosis by Robert
Haas.
To ensure this is safe even if enum comparison manages to get invoked
before we've set a transaction snapshot, tweak GetLatestSnapshot to
redirect to GetTransactionSnapshot instead of throwing error when
FirstSnapshotSet is false. The existing uses of GetLatestSnapshot (in
ri_triggers.c) don't care since they couldn't be invoked except in a
transaction that's already done some work --- but it seems just conceivable
that this might not be true of enums, especially if we ever choose to use
enums in system catalogs.
Note that the comparable coding in enum_endpoint and enum_range_internal
remains GetTransactionSnapshot; this is perhaps debatable, but if we
changed it those functions would have to be marked volatile, which doesn't
seem attractive.
Back-patch to 9.1 where ALTER TYPE ADD VALUE was added.
When the "hot" members of PGPROC were split off to separate PGXACT structs,
many PGPROC fields referred to in comments were moved to PGXACT, but the
comments were neglected in the commit. Mostly this is just a search/replace
of PGPROC with PGXACT, but the way the dummy PGPROC entries are created for
prepared transactions changed more, making some of the comments totally
bogus.
Noah Misch
This speeds up snapshot-taking and reduces ProcArrayLock contention.
Also, the PGPROC (and PGXACT) structures used by two-phase commit are
now allocated as part of the main array, rather than in a separate
array, and we keep ProcArray sorted in pointer order. These changes
are intended to minimize the number of cache lines that must be pulled
in to take a snapshot, and testing shows a substantial increase in
performance on both read and write workloads at high concurrencies.
Pavan Deolasee, Heikki Linnakangas, Robert Haas
A transaction can export a snapshot with pg_export_snapshot(), and then
others can import it with SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT. The data does not
leave the server so there are not security issues. A snapshot can only
be imported while the exporting transaction is still running, and there
are some other restrictions.
I'm not totally convinced that we've covered all the bases for SSI (true
serializable) mode, but it works fine for lesser isolation modes.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja, and rather heavily modified
by Tom Lane
In REPEATABLE READ (nee SERIALIZABLE) mode, an attempt to do
GetTransactionSnapshot() between AbortTransaction and CleanupTransaction
failed, because GetTransactionSnapshot would recompute the transaction
snapshot (which is already wrong, given the isolation mode) and then
re-register it in the TopTransactionResourceOwner, leading to an Assert
because the TopTransactionResourceOwner should be empty of resources after
AbortTransaction. This is the root cause of bug #6218 from Yamamoto
Takashi. While changing plancache.c to avoid requesting a snapshot when
handling a ROLLBACK masks the problem, I think this is really a snapmgr.c
bug: it's lower-level than the resource manager mechanism and should not be
shutting itself down before we unwind resource manager resources. However,
just postponing the release of the transaction snapshot until cleanup time
didn't work because of the circular dependency with
TopTransactionResourceOwner. Fix by managing the internal reference to
that snapshot manually instead of depending on TopTransactionResourceOwner.
This saves a few cycles as well as making the module layering more
straightforward. predicate.c's dependencies on TopTransactionResourceOwner
go away too.
I think this is a longstanding bug, but there's no evidence that it's more
than a latent bug, so it doesn't seem worth any risk of back-patching.
walsender.h should depend on xlog.h, not vice versa. (Actually, the
inclusion was circular until a couple hours ago, which was even sillier;
but Bruce broke it in the expedient rather than logically correct
direction.) Because of that poor decision, plus blind application of
pgrminclude, we had a situation where half the system was depending on
xlog.h to include such unrelated stuff as array.h and guc.h. Clean up
the header inclusion, and manually revert a lot of what pgrminclude had
done so things build again.
This episode reinforces my feeling that pgrminclude should not be run
without adult supervision. Inclusion changes in header files in particular
need to be reviewed with great care. More generally, it'd be good if we
had a clearer notion of module layering to dictate which headers can sanely
include which others ... but that's a big task for another day.
With this patch, portals, SQL functions, and SPI all agree that there
should be only a CommandCounterIncrement between the queries that are
generated from a single SQL command by rule expansion. Fetching a whole
new snapshot now happens only between original queries. This is equivalent
to the existing behavior of EXPLAIN ANALYZE, and it was judged to be the
best choice since it eliminates one source of concurrency hazards for
rules. The patch should also make things marginally faster by reducing the
number of snapshot push/pop operations.
The patch removes pg_parse_and_rewrite(), which is no longer used anywhere.
There was considerable discussion about more aggressive refactoring of the
query-processing functions exported by postgres.c, but for the moment
nothing more has been done there.
I also took the opportunity to refactor snapmgr.c's API slightly: the
former PushUpdatedSnapshot() has been split into two functions.
Marko Tiikkaja, reviewed by Steve Singer and Tom Lane
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
transaction snapshots, i.e. a snapshot registered at the beginning of
a transaction. Change variable naming and comments to reflect this reality
in preparation for a future, truly serializable mode, e.g.
Serializable Snapshot Isolation (SSI).
For the moment transaction snapshots are still used to implement
SERIALIZABLE, but hopefully not for too much longer. Patch by Kevin
Grittner and Dan Ports with review and some minor wording changes by me.
