unpruned XMAX in its header. At the cost of 4 bytes per page, this keeps us
from performing heap_page_prune when there's no chance of pruning anything.
Seems to be necessary per Heikki's preliminary performance testing.
> * -Consider shrinking expired tuples to just their headers
> * -Allow heap reuse of UPDATEd rows if no indexed columns are changed,
> and old and new versions are on the same heap page
Not needed anymore:
< * Reuse index tuples that point to heap tuples that are not visible to
< anyone?
columns, and the new version can be stored on the same heap page, we no longer
generate extra index entries for the new version. Instead, index searches
follow the HOT-chain links to ensure they find the correct tuple version.
In addition, this patch introduces the ability to "prune" dead tuples on a
per-page basis, without having to do a complete VACUUM pass to recover space.
VACUUM is still needed to clean up dead index entries, however.
Pavan Deolasee, with help from a bunch of other people.
database via builtin functions, as recently discussed on -hackers.
chr() now returns a character in the database encoding. For UTF8 encoded databases
the argument is treated as a Unicode code point. For other multi-byte encodings
the argument must designate a strict ascii character, or an error is raised,
as is also the case if the argument is 0.
ascii() is adjusted so that it remains the inverse of chr().
The two argument form of convert() is gone, and the three argument form now
takes a bytea first argument and returns a bytea. To cover this loss three new
functions are introduced:
. convert_from(bytea, name) returns text - converts the first argument from the
named encoding to the database encoding
. convert_to(text, name) returns bytea - converts the first argument from the
database encoding to the named encoding
. length(bytea, name) returns int - gives the length of the first argument in
characters in the named encoding
transaction, unless rolled back or overridden by a SET clause for the same
variable attached to a surrounding function call. Per discussion, these
seem the best semantics. Note that this is an INCOMPATIBLE CHANGE: in 8.0
through 8.2, SET LOCAL's effects disappeared at subtransaction commit
(leading to behavior that made little sense at the SQL level).
I took advantage of the opportunity to rewrite and simplify the GUC variable
save/restore logic a little bit. The old idea of a "tentative" value is gone;
it was a hangover from before we had a stack. Also, we no longer need a stack
entry for every nesting level, but only for those in which a variable's value
actually changed.
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.
(Actually, it works as a plain statement too, but I didn't document that
because it seems a bit useless.) Unify VariableResetStmt with
VariableSetStmt, and clean up some ancient cruft in the representation of
same.
There are still some loose ends: I didn't do anything about the SET FROM
CURRENT idea yet, and it's not real clear whether we are happy with the
interaction of SET LOCAL with function-local settings. The documentation
is a bit spartan, too.
