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
and heap_deformtuple in favor of the newer functions heap_form_tuple et al
(which do the same things but use bool control flags instead of arbitrary
char values). Eliminate the former duplicate coding of these functions,
reducing the deprecated functions to mere wrappers around the newer ones.
We can't get rid of them entirely because add-on modules probably still
contain many instances of the old coding style.
Kris Jurka
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.
strings. This patch introduces four support functions cstring_to_text,
cstring_to_text_with_len, text_to_cstring, and text_to_cstring_buffer, and
two macros CStringGetTextDatum and TextDatumGetCString. A number of
existing macros that provided variants on these themes were removed.
Most of the places that need to make such conversions now require just one
function or macro call, in place of the multiple notational layers that used
to be needed. There are no longer any direct calls of textout or textin,
and we got most of the places that were using handmade conversions via
memcpy (there may be a few still lurking, though).
This commit doesn't make any serious effort to eliminate transient memory
leaks caused by detoasting toasted text objects before they reach
text_to_cstring. We changed PG_GETARG_TEXT_P to PG_GETARG_TEXT_PP in a few
places where it was easy, but much more could be done.
Brendan Jurd and Tom Lane
rows will normally never obtain an XID at all. We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions. In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption. We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID. This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.
Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.
contrib functionality. Along the way, remove the USER_LOCKS configuration
symbol, since it no longer makes any sense to try to compile that out.
No user documentation yet ... mmoncure has promised to write some.
Thanks to Abhijit Menon-Sen for creating a first draft to work from.
the data defining the semantics of a lock method (ie, conflict resolution
table and ancillary data, which is all constant) and the hash tables
storing the current state. The only thing we give up by this is the
ability to use separate hashtables for different lock methods, but there
is no need for that anyway. Put some extra fields into the LockMethod
definition structs to clean up some other uglinesses, like hard-wired
tests for DEFAULT_LOCKMETHOD and USER_LOCKMETHOD. This commit doesn't
do anything about the performance issues we were discussing, but it clears
away some of the underbrush that's in the way of fixing that.
old suggestion by Oliver Jowett. Also, add a transaction column to the
pg_locks view to show the xid of each transaction holding or awaiting
locks; this allows prepared transactions to be properly associated with
the locks they own. There was already a column named 'transaction',
and I chose to rename it to 'transactionid' --- since this column is
new in the current devel cycle there should be no backwards compatibility
issue to worry about.
Essentially, we shoehorn in a lockable-object-type field by taking
a byte away from the lockmethodid, which can surely fit in one byte
instead of two. This allows less artificial definitions of all the
other fields of LOCKTAG; we can get rid of the special pg_xactlock
pseudo-relation, and also support locks on individual tuples and
general database objects (including shared objects). None of those
possibilities are actually exploited just yet, however.
I removed pg_xactlock from pg_class, but did not force initdb for
that change. At this point, relkind 's' (SPECIAL) is unused and
could be removed entirely.
PROCLOCK structs in shared memory now have only a bitmask for held
locks, rather than counts (making them 40 bytes smaller, which is a
good thing). Multiple locks within a transaction are counted in the
local hash table instead, and we have provision for tracking which
ResourceOwner each count belongs to. Solves recently reported problem
with memory leakage within long transactions.
results with tuples as ordinary varlena Datums. This commit does not
in itself do much for us, except eliminate the horrid memory leak
associated with evaluation of whole-row variables. However, it lays the
groundwork for allowing composite types as table columns, and perhaps
some other useful features as well. Per my proposal of a few days ago.
RelOid_pg_class, and transaction locks XactLockTableId. RelId is renamed
to objId.
- LockObject() and UnlockObject() functions created, and their use
sprinkled throughout the code to do descent locking for domains and
types. They accept lock modes AccessShare and AccessExclusive, as we
only really need a 'read' and 'write' lock at the moment. Most locking
cases are held until the end of the transaction.
This fixes the cases Tom mentioned earlier in regards to locking with
Domains. If the patch is good, I'll work on cleaning up issues with
other database objects that have this problem (most of them).
Rod Taylor
(overlaying low byte of page size) and add HEAP_HASOID bit to t_infomask,
per earlier discussion. Simplify scheme for overlaying fields in tuple
header (no need for cmax to live in more than one place). Don't try to
clear infomask status bits in tqual.c --- not safe to do it there. Don't
try to force output table of a SELECT INTO to have OIDs, either. Get rid
of unnecessarily complex three-state scheme for TupleDesc.tdhasoids, which
has already caused one recent failure. Improve documentation.
available (else there's no way to interpret the list links). Change
pg_locks view to show transaction ID locks separately from ordinary
relation locks. Avoid showing N duplicate rows when the same lock is
held multiple times (seems unlikely that users care about exact hold
count). Improve documentation.
to the table function, thus preventing memory leakage accumulation across
calls. This means that SRFs need to be careful to distinguish permanent
and local storage; adjust code and documentation accordingly. Patch by
Joe Conway, very minor tweaks by Tom Lane.
anonymous return type SRF code. It gets rid of the superflous
'pg_locks_result' that Bruce/Tom had commented on. Otherwise, no
changes in functionality.
Neil Conway
