The CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS call in gingetbitmap turns out to be
inadequate to prevent a long uninterruptible loop, because
we now know a case where looping occurs within scanGetItem.
While the next patch will fix the bug that caused that, it
seems foolish to assume that no similar patterns are possible.
Let's do the CFI within scanGetItem's retry loop, instead.
This demonstrably allows canceling out of the loop exhibited
in bug #19031.
Bug: #19031
Reported-by: Tim Wood <washwithcare@gmail.com>
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/19031-0638148643d25548@postgresql.org
Backpatch-through: 13
If a GIN index search had a lot of search keys (for example,
"jsonbcol ?| array[]" with tens of thousands of array elements),
both ginFillScanKey() and startScanKey() took O(N^2) time.
Worse, those loops were uncancelable for lack of CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS.
The problem in ginFillScanKey() is the brute-force search key
de-duplication done in ginFillScanEntry(). The most expedient
solution seems to be to just stop trying to de-duplicate once
there are "too many" search keys. We could imagine working harder,
say by using a sort-and-unique algorithm instead of brute force
compare-all-the-keys. But it seems unlikely to be worth the trouble.
There is no correctness issue here, since the code already allowed
duplicate keys if any extra_data is present.
The problem in startScanKey() is the loop that attempts to identify
the first non-required search key. In the submitted test case, that
vainly tests all the key positions, and each iteration takes O(N)
time. One part of that is that it's reinitializing the entryRes[]
array from scratch each time, which is entirely unnecessary given
that the triConsistentFn isn't supposed to scribble on its input.
We can easily adjust the array contents incrementally instead.
The other part of it is that the triConsistentFn may itself take
O(N) time (and does in this test case). This is all extremely
brute force: in simple cases with AND or OR semantics, we could
know without any looping whatever that all or none of the keys
are required. But GIN opclasses don't have any API for exposing
that knowledge, so at least in the short run there is little to
be done about that. Put in a CHECK_FOR_INTERRUPTS so that at
least the loop is cancelable.
These two changes together resolve the primary complaint that
the test query doesn't respond promptly to cancel interrupts.
Also, while they don't completely eliminate the O(N^2) behavior,
they do provide quite a nice speedup for mid-sized examples.
Bug: #18831
Reported-by: Niek <niek.brasa@hitachienergy.com>
Author: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/18831-e845ac44ebc5dd36@postgresql.org
Backpatch-through: 13
The ginfast.c code previously checked for conflicts in before locking
the relevant buffer, leaving a window where a RW conflict could be
missed. Re-order.
There was also a place where buffer ID and block number were confused
while trying to predicate-lock a page, noted by visual inspection.
Back-patch to all supported releases. Fixes one more problem discovered
with the reproducer from bug #17949, in this case when Dmitry tried
other index types.
Reported-by: Artem Anisimov <artem.anisimov.255@gmail.com>
Reported-by: Dmitry Dolgov <9erthalion6@gmail.com>
Reviewed-by: Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi>
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/17949-a0f17035294a55e2%40postgresql.org
collectMatchBitmap() needs to re-find the index tuple it was previously
looking at, after transiently dropping lock on the index page it's on.
The tuple should still exist and be at its prior position or somewhere
to the right of that, since ginvacuum never removes tuples but
concurrent insertions could add one. However, there was a thinko in
that logic, to the effect of expecting any inserted tuples to have the
same index "attnum" as what we'd been scanning. Since there's no
physical separation of tuples with different attnums, it's not terribly
hard to devise scenarios where this fails, leading to transient "lost
saved point in index" errors. (While I've duplicated this with manual
testing, it seems impossible to make a reproducible test case with our
available testing technology.)
Fix by just continuing the scan when the attnum doesn't match.
While here, improve the error message used if we do fail, so that it
matches the wording used in btree for a similar case.
collectMatchBitmap()'s posting-tree code path was previously not
exercised at all by our regression tests. While I can't make
a regression test that exhibits the bug, I can at least improve
the code coverage here, so do that. The test case I made for this
is an extension of one added by 4b754d6c1, so it only works in
HEAD and v13; didn't seem worth trying hard to back-patch it.
Per bug #16595 from Jesse Kinkead. This has been broken since
multicolumn capability was added to GIN (commit 27cb66fdf),
so back-patch to all supported branches.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16595-633118be8eef9ce2@postgresql.org
entryGetItem()'s three code paths each contained bugs associated
with filtering the entries for gin_fuzzy_search_limit.
The posting-tree path failed to advance "advancePast" after having
decided to filter an item. If we ran out of items on the current
page and needed to advance to the next, what would actually happen
is that entryLoadMoreItems() would re-load the same page. Eventually,
the random dropItem() test would accept one of the same items it'd
previously rejected, and we'd move on --- but it could take awhile
with small gin_fuzzy_search_limit. To add insult to injury, this
case would inevitably cause entryLoadMoreItems() to decide it needed
to re-descend from the root, making things even slower.
The posting-list path failed to implement gin_fuzzy_search_limit
filtering at all, so that all entries in the posting list would
be returned.
The bitmap-result path used a "gotitem" variable that it failed to
update in the one place where it'd actually make a difference, ie
at the one "continue" statement. I think this was unreachable in
practice, because if we'd looped around then it shouldn't be the
case that the entries on the new page are before advancePast.
Still, the "gotitem" variable was contributing nothing to either
clarity or correctness, so get rid of it.
Refactor all three loops so that the termination conditions are
more alike and less unreadable.
The code coverage report showed that we had no coverage at all for
the re-descend-from-root code path in entryLoadMoreItems(), which
seems like a very bad thing, so add a test case that exercises it.
We also had exactly no coverage for gin_fuzzy_search_limit, so add a
simplistic test case that at least hits those code paths a little bit.
Back-patch to all supported branches.
Adé Heyward and Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEknJCdS-dE1Heddptm7ay2xTbSeADbkaQ8bU2AXRCVC2LdtKQ@mail.gmail.com
The strategy of GIN index scan is driven by opclass-specific extract_query
method. This method that needed search mode is GIN_SEARCH_MODE_ALL. This
mode means that matching tuple may contain none of extracted entries. Simple
example is '!term' tsquery, which doesn't need any term to exist in matching
tsvector.
In order to handle such scan key GIN calculates virtual entry, which contains
all TIDs of all entries of attribute. In fact this is full scan of index
attribute. And typically this is very slow, but allows to handle some queries
correctly in GIN. However, current algorithm calculate such virtual entry for
each GIN_SEARCH_MODE_ALL scan key even if they are multiple for the same
attribute. This is clearly not optimal.
This commit improves the situation by introduction of "exclude only" scan keys.
Such scan keys are not capable to return set of matching TIDs. Instead, they
are capable only to filter TIDs produced by normal scan keys. Therefore,
each attribute should contain at least one normal scan key, while rest of them
may be "exclude only" if search mode is GIN_SEARCH_MODE_ALL.
The same optimization might be applied to the whole scan, not per-attribute.
But that leads to NULL values elimination problem. There is trade-off between
multiple possible ways to do this. We probably want to do this later using
some cost-based decision algorithm.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAOBaU_YGP5-BEt5Cc0%3DzMve92vocPzD%2BXiZgiZs1kjY0cj%3DXBg%40mail.gmail.com
Author: Nikita Glukhov, Alexander Korotkov, Tom Lane, Julien Rouhaud
Reviewed-by: Julien Rouhaud, Tomas Vondra, Tom Lane
According to README we acquire predicate locks on entry tree leafs and posting
tree roots. However, when ginFindLeafPage() is going to lock leaf in exclusive
mode, then it checks root for conflicts regardless whether it's a entry or
posting tree. Assuming that we never place predicate lock on entry tree root
(excluding corner case when root is leaf), this check is redundant. This
commit removes this check. Now, root conflict checking is controlled by
separate argument of ginFindLeafPage().
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAPpHfdv7rrDyy%3DMgsaK-L9kk0AH7az0B-mdC3w3p0FSb9uoyEg%40mail.gmail.com
Author: Alexander Korotkov
Backpatch-through: 11
The principle behind the locking was not very well thought-out, and not
documented. Add a section in the README to explain how it's supposed to
work, and change the code so that it actually works that way.
This fixes two bugs:
1. If fast update was turned on concurrently, subsequent inserts to the
pending list would not conflict with predicate locks that were acquired
earlier, on entry pages. The included 'predicate-gin-fastupdate' test
demonstrates that. To fix, make all scans acquire a predicate lock on
the metapage. That lock represents a scan of the pending list, whether
or not there is a pending list at the moment. Forget about the
optimization to skip locking/checking for locks, when fastupdate=off.
2. If a scan finds no match, it still needs to lock the entry page. The
point of predicate locks is to lock the gabs between values, whether
or not there is a match. The included 'predicate-gin-nomatch' test
tests that case.
In addition to those two bug fixes, this removes some unnecessary locking,
following the principle laid out in the README. Because all items in
a posting tree have the same key value, a lock on the posting tree root is
enough to cover all the items. (With a very large posting tree, it would
possibly be better to lock the posting tree leaf pages instead, so that a
"skip scan" with a query like "A & B", you could avoid unnecessary conflict
if a new tuple is inserted with A but !B. But let's keep this simple.)
Also, some spelling fixes.
Author: Heikki Linnakangas with some editorization by me
Review: Andrey Borodin, Alexander Korotkov
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/0b3ad2c2-2692-62a9-3a04-5724f2af9114@iki.fi
Predicate locks are used on per page basis only if fastupdate = off, in
opposite case predicate lock on pending list will effectively lock whole index,
to reduce locking overhead, just lock a relation. Entry and posting trees are
essentially B-tree, so locks are acquired on leaf pages only.
Author: Shubham Barai with some editorization by me and Dmitry Ivanov
Review by: Alexander Korotkov, Dmitry Ivanov, Fedor Sigaev
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CALxAEPt5sWW+EwTaKUGFL5_XFcZ0MuGBcyJ70oqbWqr42YKR8Q@mail.gmail.com
The lower case spellings are C and C++ standard and are used in most
parts of the PostgreSQL sources. The upper case spellings are only used
in some files/modules. So standardize on the standard spellings.
The APIs for ICU, Perl, and Windows define their own TRUE and FALSE, so
those are left as is when using those APIs.
In code comments, we use the lower-case spelling for the C concepts and
keep the upper-case spelling for the SQL concepts.
Reviewed-by: Michael Paquier <michael.paquier@gmail.com>
This is a mechanical change in preparation for a later commit that
will change the layout of TupleDesc. Introducing a macro to abstract
the details of where attributes are stored will allow us to change
that in separate step and revise it in future.
Author: Thomas Munro, editorialized by Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAEepm=0ZtQ-SpsgCyzzYpsXS6e=kZWqk3g5Ygn3MDV7A8dabUA@mail.gmail.com
Don't move parenthesized lines to the left, even if that means they
flow past the right margin.
By default, BSD indent lines up statement continuation lines that are
within parentheses so that they start just to the right of the preceding
left parenthesis. However, traditionally, if that resulted in the
continuation line extending to the right of the desired right margin,
then indent would push it left just far enough to not overrun the margin,
if it could do so without making the continuation line start to the left of
the current statement indent. That makes for a weird mix of indentations
unless one has been completely rigid about never violating the 80-column
limit.
This behavior has been pretty universally panned by Postgres developers.
Hence, disable it with indent's new -lpl switch, so that parenthesized
lines are always lined up with the preceding left paren.
This patch is much less interesting than the first round of indent
changes, but also bulkier, so I thought it best to separate the effects.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/E1dAmxK-0006EE-1r@gemulon.postgresql.org
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/30527.1495162840@sss.pgh.pa.us
There are no functional changes here; this simply encapsulates knowledge
of the ItemPointerData struct so that a future patch can change things
without more breakage.
All direct users of ip_blkid and ip_posid are changed to use existing
macros ItemPointerGetBlockNumber and ItemPointerGetOffsetNumber
respectively. For callers where that's inappropriate (because they
Assert that the itempointer is is valid-looking), add
ItemPointerGetBlockNumberNoCheck and ItemPointerGetOffsetNumberNoCheck,
which lack the assertion but are otherwise identical.
Author: Pavan Deolasee
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CABOikdNnFon4cJiL=h1mZH3bgUeU+sWHuU4Yr8AB=j3A2p1GiA@mail.gmail.com
When a shared iterator is used, each call to tbm_shared_iterate()
returns a result that has not yet been returned to any process
attached to the shared iterator. In other words, each cooperating
processes gets a disjoint subset of the full result set, but all
results are returned exactly once.
This is infrastructure for parallel bitmap heap scan.
Dilip Kumar. The larger patch set of which this is a part has been
reviewed and tested by (at least) Andres Freund, Amit Khandekar,
Tushar Ahuja, Rafia Sabih, Haribabu Kommi, and Thomas Munro.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CAFiTN-uc4=0WxRGfCzs-xfkMYcSEWUC-Fon6thkJGjkh9i=13A@mail.gmail.com
The reverted changes were intended to force a choice of whether any
newly-added BufferGetPage() calls needed to be accompanied by a
test of the snapshot age, to support the "snapshot too old"
feature. Such an accompanying test is needed in about 7% of the
cases, where the page is being used as part of a scan rather than
positioning for other purposes (such as DML or vacuuming). The
additional effort required for back-patching, and the doubt whether
the intended benefit would really be there, have indicated it is
best just to rely on developers to do the right thing based on
comments and existing usage, as we do with many other conventions.
This change should have little or no effect on generated executable
code.
Motivated by the back-patching pain of Tom Lane and Robert Haas
The code had a query-lifespan memory leak when encountering GIN entries
that have posting lists (rather than posting trees, ie, there are a
relatively small number of heap tuples containing this index key value).
With a suitable data distribution this could add up to a lot of leakage.
Problem seems to have been introduced by commit 36a35c550, so back-patch
to 9.4.
Julien Rouhaud
This feature is controlled by a new old_snapshot_threshold GUC. A
value of -1 disables the feature, and that is the default. The
value of 0 is just intended for testing. Above that it is the
number of minutes a snapshot can reach before pruning and vacuum
are allowed to remove dead tuples which the snapshot would
otherwise protect. The xmin associated with a transaction ID does
still protect dead tuples. A connection which is using an "old"
snapshot does not get an error unless it accesses a page modified
recently enough that it might not be able to produce accurate
results.
This is similar to the Oracle feature, and we use the same SQLSTATE
and error message for compatibility.
This patch is a no-op patch which is intended to reduce the chances
of failures of omission once the functional part of the "snapshot
too old" patch goes in. It adds parameters for snapshot, relation,
and an enum to specify whether the snapshot age check needs to be
done for the page at this point. This initial patch passes NULL
for the first two new parameters and BGP_NO_SNAPSHOT_TEST for the
third. The follow-on patch will change the places where the test
needs to be made.
Commit d88976cfa1 removed this code from ginFreeScanKeys():
- if (entry->list)
- pfree(entry->list);
evidently in the belief that that ItemPointer array is allocated in the
keyCtx and so would be reclaimed by the following MemoryContextReset.
Unfortunately, it isn't and it won't. It'd likely be a good idea for
that to become so, but as a simple and back-patchable fix in the
meantime, restore this code to ginFreeScanKeys().
Also, add a similar pfree to where startScanEntry() is about to zero out
entry->list. I am not sure if there are any code paths where this
change prevents a leak today, but it seems like cheap future-proofing.
In passing, make the initial allocation of so->entries[] use palloc
not palloc0. The code doesn't depend on unused entries being zero;
if it did, the array-enlargement code in ginFillScanEntry() would be
wrong. So using palloc0 initially can only serve to confuse readers
about what the invariant is.
Per report from Felipe de Jesús Molina Bravo, via Jaime Casanova in
<CAJGNTeMR1ndMU2Thpr8GPDUfiHTV7idELJRFusA5UXUGY1y-eA@mail.gmail.com>
This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
It was getting tedious to track and release all the different things that
form a scan key. We were leaking at least the queryCategories array, and
possibly more, on a rescan. That was visible if a GIN index was used in a
nested loop join. This also protects from leaks in extractQuery method.
No backpatching, given the lack of complaints from the field. Maybe later,
after this has received more field testing.
The requiredEntries / additionalEntries arrays were not freed in
freeScanKeys() like other per-key stuff.
It's not obvious, but startScanKey() was only ever called after the keys
have been initialized with ginNewScanKey(). That's why it doesn't need to
worry about freeing existing arrays. The ginIsNewKey() test in gingetbitmap
was never true, because ginrescan free's the existing keys, and it's not OK
to call gingetbitmap twice in a row without calling ginrescan in between.
To make that clear, remove the unnecessary ginIsNewKey(). And just to be
extra sure that nothing funny happens if there is an existing key after all,
call freeScanKeys() to free it if it exists. This makes the code more
straightforward.
(I'm seeing other similar leaks in testing a query that rescans an GIN index
scan, but that's a different issue. This just fixes the obvious leak with
those two arrays.)
Backpatch to 9.4, where GIN fast scan was added.
When gin_fuzzy_search_limit was used, we could jump out of startScan()
without calling startScanKey(). That was harmless in 9.3 and below, because
startScanKey()() didn't do anything interesting, but in 9.4 it initializes
information needed for skipping entries (aka GIN fast scans), and you
readily get a segfault if it's not done. Nevertheless, it was clearly wrong
all along, so backpatch all the way to 9.1 where the early return was
introduced.
(AFAICS startScanKey() did nothing useful in 9.3 and below, because the
fields it initialized were already initialized in ginFillScanKey(), but I
don't dare to change that in a minor release. ginFillScanKey() is always
called in gingetbitmap() even though there's a check there to see if the
scan keys have already been initialized, because they never are; ginrescan()
free's them.)
In the passing, remove unnecessary if-check from the second inner loop in
startScan(). We already check in the first loop that the condition is true
for all entries.
Reported by Olaf Gawenda, bug #12694, Backpatch to 9.1 and above, although
AFAICS it causes a live bug only in 9.4.
When returning rows from a bitmap, as done with partial match queries, we
would get stuck in an infinite loop if the bitmap contained a lossy page
reference.
This bug is new in master, it was introduced by the patch to allow skipping
items refuted by other entries in GIN scans.
Report and fix by Alexander Korotkov
There were a couple of bugs here. First, if the fuzzy limit was exceeded,
the loop in entryGetItem might drop out too soon if a whole block needs to
be skipped because it's < advancePast ("continue" in a while-loop checks the
loop condition too). Secondly, the loop checked when stepping to a new page
that there is at least one offset on the page < advancePast, but we cannot
rely on that on subsequent calls of entryGetItem, because advancePast might
change in between. That caused the skipping loop to read bogus items in the
TbmIterateResult's offset array.
First item and fix by Alexander Korotkov, second bug pointed out by Fabrízio
de Royes Mello, by a small variation of Alexander's test query.
The shimTriConstistentFn, which calls the opclass's consistent function with
all combinations of TRUE/FALSE for any MAYBE argument, modifies the entryRes
array passed by the caller. Change startScanKey to re-initialize it between
each call to accommodate that.
It's actually a bad habit by shimTriConsistentFn to modify its argument. But
the only caller that doesn't already re-initialize the entryRes array was
startScanKey, and it's easy for startScanKey to do so. Add a comment to
shimTriConsistentFn about that.
Note: this does not give a free pass to opclass-provided consistent
functions to modify the entryRes argument; shimTriConsistent assumes that
they don't, even though it does it itself.
While at it, refactor startScanKey to allocate the requiredEntries and
additionalEntries after it knows exactly how large they need to be. Saves a
little bit of memory, and looks nicer anyway.
Per complaint by Tom Lane, buildfarm and the pg_trgm regression test.
If you have a GIN query like "rare & frequent", we currently fetch all the
items that match either rare or frequent, call the consistent function for
each item, and let the consistent function filter out items that only match
one of the terms. However, if we can deduce that "rare" must be present for
the overall qual to be true, we can scan all the rare items, and for each
rare item, skip over to the next frequent item with the same or greater TID.
That greatly speeds up "rare & frequent" type queries.
To implement that, introduce the concept of a tri-state consistent function,
where the 3rd value is MAYBE, indicating that we don't know if that term is
present. Operator classes only provide a boolean consistent function, so we
simulate the tri-state consistent function by calling the boolean function
several times, with the MAYBE arguments set to all combinations of TRUE and
FALSE. Testing all combinations is only feasible for a small number of MAYBE
arguments, but it is envisioned that we'll provide a way for operator
classes to provide a native tri-state consistent function, which can be much
more efficient. But that is not included in this patch.
We were already using that trick to for lossy pages, calling the consistent
function with the lossy entry set to TRUE and FALSE. Now that we have the
tri-state consistent function, use it for lossy pages too.
Alexander Korotkov, with fair amount of refactoring by me.
When skipping over some items in a posting tree, re-find the new location
by descending the tree from root, rather than walking the right links.
This can save a lot of I/O.
Heavily modified from Alexander Korotkov's fast scan patch.
If we're skipping past a certain TID, avoid decoding posting list segments
that only contain smaller TIDs.
Extracted from Alexander Korotkov's fast scan patch, heavily modified.
In a multi-key search, ie. something like "col @> 'foo' AND col @> 'bar'",
as soon as we find the next item that matches the first criteria, we don't
need to check the second criteria for TIDs smaller the first match. That
saves a lot of effort, especially if one of the terms is rare, while the
second occurs very frequently.
Based on ideas from Alexander Korotkov's fast scan patch.
GIN posting lists are now encoded using varbyte-encoding, which allows them
to fit in much smaller space than the straight ItemPointer array format used
before. The new encoding is used for both the lists stored in-line in entry
tree items, and in posting tree leaf pages.
To maintain backwards-compatibility and keep pg_upgrade working, the code
can still read old-style pages and tuples. Posting tree leaf pages in the
new format are flagged with GIN_COMPRESSED flag, to distinguish old and new
format pages. Likewise, entry tree tuples in the new format have a
GIN_ITUP_COMPRESSED flag set in a bit that was previously unused.
This patch bumps GIN_CURRENT_VERSION from 1 to 2. New indexes created with
version 9.4 will therefore have version number 2 in the metapage, while old
pg_upgraded indexes will have version 1. The code treats them the same, but
it might be come handy in the future, if we want to drop support for the
uncompressed format.
Alexander Korotkov and me. Reviewed by Tomas Vondra and Amit Langote.
Separate the insertion payload from the more static portions of GinBtree.
GinBtree now only contains information related to searching the tree, and
the information of what to insert is passed separately.
Add root block number to GinBtree, instead of passing it around all the
functions as argument.
Split off ginFinishSplit() from ginInsertValue(). ginFinishSplit is
responsible for finding the parent and inserting the downlink to it.
If a page is deleted, and reused for something else, just as a search is
following a rightlink to it from its left sibling, the search would continue
scanning whatever the new contents of the page are. That could lead to
incorrect query results, or even something more curious if the page is
reused for a different kind of a page.
To fix, modify the search algorithm to lock the next page before releasing
the previous one, and refrain from deleting pages from the leftmost branch
of the tree.
Add a new Concurrency section to the README, explaining why this works.
There is a lot more one could say about concurrency in GIN, but that's for
another patch.
Backpatch to all supported versions.
It makes for cleaner code to have separate Get/Add functions for PostingItems
and ItemPointers. A few callsites that have to deal with both types need to
be duplicated because of this, but all the callers have to know which one
they're dealing with anyway. Overall, this reduces the amount of casting
required.
Extracted from Alexander Korotkov's larger patch to change the data page
format.
Tom Lane