readability. Bizarre '(long *) TRUE' return convention is gone,
in favor of just raising an error internally in dynahash.c when
we detect hashtable corruption. HashTableWalk is gone, in favor
of using hash_seq_search directly, since it had no hope of working
with non-LONGALIGNable datatypes. Simplify some other code that was
made undesirably grotty by promixity to HashTableWalk.
- New functions to create a portal using a prepared/saved
SPI plan or lookup an existing portal by name.
- Functions to fetch/move from/in portals. Results are placed
in the usual SPI_processed and SPI_tuptable, so the entire
set of utility functions can be used to gain attribute access.
- Prepared/saved SPI plans now use their own memory context
and SPI_freeplan(plan) can remove them.
- Tuple result sets (SPI_tuptable) now uses it's own memory
context and can be free'd by SPI_freetuptable(tuptab).
Enhancement of PL/pgSQL
- Uses generic named portals internally in FOR ... SELECT
loops to avoid running out of memory on huge result sets.
- Support for CURSOR and REFCURSOR syntax using the new SPI
functionality. Cursors used internally only need no explicit
transaction block. Refcursor variables can be used inside
of explicit transaction block to pass cursors between main
application and functions.
Jan
when user does another FETCH after reaching end of data, or another
FETCH backwards after reaching start. This is needed because some plan
nodes are not very robust about being called again after they've already
returned NULL; for example, MergeJoin will crash in some states but not
others. While the ideal approach would be for them all to handle this
correctly, it seems foolish to assume that no such bugs would creep in
again once cleaned up. Therefore, the most robust answer is to prevent
the situation from arising at all.
for details). It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably. A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing. Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.
transaction abort --- before it only worked if there was exactly one level
of allocation context stacked in the blank portal. Now it does the right
thing for any depth, including zero...
this one could be useful for people experiencing out-of-memory crashes while
executing queries which retrieve or use a very large number of tuples.
The problem happens when storage is allocated for functions results used in
a large query, for example:
select upper(name) from big_table;
select big_table.array[1] from big_table;
select count(upper(name)) from big_table;
This patch is a dirty hack that fixes the out-of-memory problem for the most
common cases, like the above ones. It is not the final solution for the
problem but it can work for some people, so I'm posting it.
The patch should be safe because all changes are under #ifdef. Furthermore
the feature can be enabled or disabled at runtime by the `free_tuple_memory'
options in the pg_options file. The option is disabled by default and must
be explicitly enabled at runtime to have any effect.
To enable the patch add the follwing line to Makefile.custom:
CUSTOM_COPT += -DFREE_TUPLE_MEMORY
To enable the option at runtime add the following line to pg_option:
free_tuple_memory=1
Massimo
Bruce Momjian