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Robert Haas 568d4138c6 Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans.
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.
2013-07-02 09:47:01 -04:00
config Be consistent about #define'ing configure symbols as "1" not empty. 2013-06-15 14:11:43 -04:00
contrib Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans. 2013-07-02 09:47:01 -04:00
doc Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans. 2013-07-02 09:47:01 -04:00
src Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans. 2013-07-02 09:47:01 -04:00
.gitignore Add pkg-config files for libpq and ecpg libraries 2013-03-31 16:58:40 -04:00
aclocal.m4
configure Be consistent about #define'ing configure symbols as "1" not empty. 2013-06-15 14:11:43 -04:00
configure.in Be consistent about #define'ing configure symbols as "1" not empty. 2013-06-15 14:11:43 -04:00
COPYRIGHT Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
GNUmakefile.in Make init-po and update-po recursive make targets 2012-06-29 14:01:54 +03:00
Makefile Allow make check in PL directories 2011-02-15 06:52:12 +02:00
README Remove useless whitespace at end of lines 2010-11-23 22:34:55 +02:00
README.git Trivial typo fix. 2010-09-21 14:16:00 -04:00

PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the
file HISTORY.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.