cursors. Patch from Joachim Wieland, review and ediorialization by Neil
Conway. The view lists cursors defined by DECLARE CURSOR, using SPI, or
via the Bind message of the frontend/backend protocol. This means the
view does not list the unnamed portal or the portal created to implement
EXECUTE. Because we do list SPI portals, there might be more rows in
this view than you might expect if you are using SPI implicitly (e.g.
via a procedural language).
Per recent discussion on -hackers, the query string included in the
view for cursors defined by DECLARE CURSOR is based on
debug_query_string. That means it is not accurate if multiple queries
separated by semicolons are submitted as one query string. However,
there doesn't seem a trivial fix for that: debug_query_string
is better than nothing. I also changed SPI_cursor_open() to include
the source text for the portal it creates: AFAICS there is no reason
not to do this.
Update the documentation and regression tests, bump the catversion.
deferred triggers: either one can create more work for the other,
so we have to loop till it's all gone. Per example from andrew@supernews.
Add a regression test to help spot trouble in this area in future.
as per recent discussions. Invent SubTransactionIds that are managed like
CommandIds (ie, counter is reset at start of each top transaction), and
use these instead of TransactionIds to keep track of subtransaction status
in those modules that need it. This means that a subtransaction does not
need an XID unless it actually inserts/modifies rows in the database.
Accordingly, don't assign it an XID nor take a lock on the XID until it
tries to do that. This saves a lot of overhead for subtransactions that
are only used for error recovery (eg plpgsql exceptions). Also, arrange
to release a subtransaction's XID lock as soon as the subtransaction
exits, in both the commit and abort cases. This avoids holding many
unique locks after a long series of subtransactions. The price is some
additional overhead in XactLockTableWait, but that seems acceptable.
Finally, restructure the state machine in xact.c to have a more orthogonal
set of states for subtransactions.
keep track of portal-related resources separately from transaction-related
resources. This allows cursors to work in a somewhat sane fashion with
nested transactions. For now, cursor behavior is non-subtransactional,
that is a cursor's state does not roll back if you abort a subtransaction
that fetched from the cursor. We might want to change that later.
performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.
Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.
handle multiple 'formats' for data I/O. Restructure CommandDest and
DestReceiver stuff one more time (it's finally starting to look a bit
clean though). Code now matches latest 3.0 protocol document as far
as message formats go --- but there is no support for binary I/O yet.
DestReceiver pointers instead of just CommandDest values. The DestReceiver
is made at the point where the destination is selected, rather than
deep inside the executor. This cleans up the original kluge implementation
of tstoreReceiver.c, and makes it easy to support retrieving results
from utility statements inside portals. Thus, you can now do fun things
like Bind and Execute a FETCH or EXPLAIN command, and it'll all work
as expected (e.g., you can Describe the portal, or use Execute's count
parameter to suspend the output partway through). Implementation involves
stuffing the utility command's output into a Tuplestore, which would be
kind of annoying for huge output sets, but should be quite acceptable
for typical uses of utility commands.
Both plannable queries and utility commands are now always executed
within Portals, which have been revamped so that they can handle the
load (they used to be good only for single SELECT queries). Restructure
code to push command-completion-tag selection logic out of postgres.c,
so that it won't have to be duplicated between simple and extended queries.
initdb forced due to addition of a field to Query nodes.
(materialization into a tuple store) discussed on pgsql-hackers earlier.
I've updated the documentation and the regression tests.
Notes on the implementation:
- I needed to change the tuple store API slightly -- it assumes that it
won't be used to hold data across transaction boundaries, so the temp
files that it uses for on-disk storage are automatically reclaimed at
end-of-transaction. I added a flag to tuplestore_begin_heap() to control
this behavior. Is changing the tuple store API in this fashion OK?
- in order to store executor results in a tuple store, I added a new
CommandDest. This works well for the most part, with one exception: the
current DestFunction API doesn't provide enough information to allow the
Executor to store results into an arbitrary tuple store (where the
particular tuple store to use is chosen by the call site of
ExecutorRun). To workaround this, I've temporarily hacked up a solution
that works, but is not ideal: since the receiveTuple DestFunction is
passed the portal name, we can use that to lookup the Portal data
structure for the cursor and then use that to get at the tuple store the
Portal is using. This unnecessarily ties the Portal code with the
tupleReceiver code, but it works...
The proper fix for this is probably to change the DestFunction API --
Tom suggested passing the full QueryDesc to the receiveTuple function.
In that case, callers of ExecutorRun could "subclass" QueryDesc to add
any additional fields that their particular CommandDest needed to get
access to. This approach would work, but I'd like to think about it for
a little bit longer before deciding which route to go. In the mean time,
the code works fine, so I don't think a fix is urgent.
- (semi-related) I added a NO SCROLL keyword to DECLARE CURSOR, and
adjusted the behavior of SCROLL in accordance with the discussion on
-hackers.
- (unrelated) Cleaned up some SGML markup in sql.sgml, copy.sgml
Neil Conway
utility statement (DeclareCursorStmt) with a SELECT query dangling from
it, rather than a SELECT query with a few unusual fields in it. Add
code to determine whether a planned query can safely be run backwards.
If DECLARE CURSOR specifies SCROLL, ensure that the plan can be run
backwards by adding a Materialize plan node if it can't. Without SCROLL,
you get an error if you try to fetch backwards from a cursor that can't
handle it. (There is still some discussion about what the exact
behavior should be, but this is necessary infrastructure in any case.)
Along the way, make EXPLAIN DECLARE CURSOR work.
to plan nodes, not vice-versa. All executor state nodes now inherit from
struct PlanState. Copying of plan trees has been simplified by not
storing a list of SubPlans in Plan nodes (eliminating duplicate links).
The executor still needs such a list, but it can build it during
ExecutorStart since it has to scan the plan tree anyway.
No initdb forced since no stored-on-disk structures changed, but you
will need a full recompile because of node-numbering changes.
in snapshots, per my proposal of a few days ago. Also, tweak heapam.c
routines (heap_insert, heap_update, heap_delete, heap_mark4update) to
be passed the command ID to use, instead of doing GetCurrentCommandID.
For catalog updates they'll still get passed current command ID, but
for updates generated from the main executor they'll get passed the
command ID saved in the snapshot the query is using. This should fix
some corner cases associated with functions and triggers that advance
current command ID while an outer query is still in progress.
originally created with, so that the set of visible tuples does not
change as a result of other activity. This essentially makes PG cursors
INSENSITIVE per the SQL92 definition. See bug report of 13-Feb-02.
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