postgresql/contrib
Alvaro Herrera 0ac5ad5134 Improve concurrency of foreign key locking
This patch introduces two additional lock modes for tuples: "SELECT FOR
KEY SHARE" and "SELECT FOR NO KEY UPDATE".  These don't block each
other, in contrast with already existing "SELECT FOR SHARE" and "SELECT
FOR UPDATE".  UPDATE commands that do not modify the values stored in
the columns that are part of the key of the tuple now grab a SELECT FOR
NO KEY UPDATE lock on the tuple, allowing them to proceed concurrently
with tuple locks of the FOR KEY SHARE variety.

Foreign key triggers now use FOR KEY SHARE instead of FOR SHARE; this
means the concurrency improvement applies to them, which is the whole
point of this patch.

The added tuple lock semantics require some rejiggering of the multixact
module, so that the locking level that each transaction is holding can
be stored alongside its Xid.  Also, multixacts now need to persist
across server restarts and crashes, because they can now represent not
only tuple locks, but also tuple updates.  This means we need more
careful tracking of lifetime of pg_multixact SLRU files; since they now
persist longer, we require more infrastructure to figure out when they
can be removed.  pg_upgrade also needs to be careful to copy
pg_multixact files over from the old server to the new, or at least part
of multixact.c state, depending on the versions of the old and new
servers.

Tuple time qualification rules (HeapTupleSatisfies routines) need to be
careful not to consider tuples with the "is multi" infomask bit set as
being only locked; they might need to look up MultiXact values (i.e.
possibly do pg_multixact I/O) to find out the Xid that updated a tuple,
whereas they previously were assured to only use information readily
available from the tuple header.  This is considered acceptable, because
the extra I/O would involve cases that would previously cause some
commands to block waiting for concurrent transactions to finish.

Another important change is the fact that locking tuples that have
previously been updated causes the future versions to be marked as
locked, too; this is essential for correctness of foreign key checks.
This causes additional WAL-logging, also (there was previously a single
WAL record for a locked tuple; now there are as many as updated copies
of the tuple there exist.)

With all this in place, contention related to tuples being checked by
foreign key rules should be much reduced.

As a bonus, the old behavior that a subtransaction grabbing a stronger
tuple lock than the parent (sub)transaction held on a given tuple and
later aborting caused the weaker lock to be lost, has been fixed.

Many new spec files were added for isolation tester framework, to ensure
overall behavior is sane.  There's probably room for several more tests.

There were several reviewers of this patch; in particular, Noah Misch
and Andres Freund spent considerable time in it.  Original idea for the
patch came from Simon Riggs, after a problem report by Joel Jacobson.
Most code is from me, with contributions from Marti Raudsepp, Alexander
Shulgin, Noah Misch and Andres Freund.

This patch was discussed in several pgsql-hackers threads; the most
important start at the following message-ids:
	AANLkTimo9XVcEzfiBR-ut3KVNDkjm2Vxh+t8kAmWjPuv@mail.gmail.com
	1290721684-sup-3951@alvh.no-ip.org
	1294953201-sup-2099@alvh.no-ip.org
	1320343602-sup-2290@alvh.no-ip.org
	1339690386-sup-8927@alvh.no-ip.org
	4FE5FF020200002500048A3D@gw.wicourts.gov
	4FEAB90A0200002500048B7D@gw.wicourts.gov
2013-01-23 12:04:59 -03:00
..
adminpack Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
auth_delay
auto_explain Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
btree_gin
btree_gist
chkpass
citext
cube Improve handling of ereport(ERROR) and elog(ERROR). 2013-01-13 18:40:09 -05:00
dblink Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
dict_int Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
dict_xsyn Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
dummy_seclabel Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
earthdistance
file_fdw Improve concurrency of foreign key locking 2013-01-23 12:04:59 -03:00
fuzzystrmatch Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
hstore
intagg
intarray
isn Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
lo
ltree
oid2name
pageinspect Improve concurrency of foreign key locking 2013-01-23 12:04:59 -03:00
passwordcheck Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
pg_archivecleanup
pg_buffercache
pg_freespacemap
pg_standby
pg_stat_statements Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
pg_test_fsync Move long_options structures to the top of main() functions, for 2012-11-30 14:49:55 -05:00
pg_test_timing Move long_options structures to the top of main() functions, for 2012-11-30 14:49:55 -05:00
pg_trgm
pg_upgrade Improve concurrency of foreign key locking 2013-01-23 12:04:59 -03:00
pg_upgrade_support Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
pgbench Add new "-q" logging option (quiet mode) while in initialize mode 2013-01-07 11:13:44 +09:00
pgcrypto
pgrowlocks Improve concurrency of foreign key locking 2013-01-23 12:04:59 -03:00
pgstattuple Add pgstatginindex() function to get the size of the GIN pending list. 2012-12-05 09:58:03 +02:00
seg Improve handling of ereport(ERROR) and elog(ERROR). 2013-01-13 18:40:09 -05:00
sepgsql Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
spi
sslinfo
start-scripts
tablefunc Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
tcn Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
test_parser Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
tsearch2 Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
unaccent Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
uuid-ossp Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
vacuumlo Update copyrights for 2013 2013-01-01 17:15:01 -05:00
worker_spi Background worker processes 2012-12-06 17:47:30 -03:00
xml2
contrib-global.mk
Makefile Background worker processes 2012-12-06 17:47:30 -03:00
README

The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------

This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree.  This does not preclude their
usefulness.

User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.

When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target.  You can
also build and install them all by running "gmake all" and "gmake
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.

Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types.  To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command.  In a fresh database,
you can simply do

    CREATE EXTENSION module_name;

See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.