Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
String are converted to UTF8 on the way into perl and to the
database encoding on the way back. This avoids a number of
observed anomalies, and ensures Perl a consistent view of the
world.
Some minor code cleanups are also accomplished.
Alex Hunsaker, reviewed by Andy Colson.
Remove the claim that ALTER TABLE .. SET DATA TYPE is the fastest way of
rewriting a table, since it no longer is.
Noah Misch and Robert Haas, based on a suggestion from Tom Lane.
src/pl/plpgsql/src/plerrcodes.h, src/include/utils/errcodes.h, and a
big chunk of errcodes.sgml are now automatically generated from a single
file, src/backend/utils/errcodes.txt.
Jan Urbański, reviewed by Tom Lane.
Add the current xlog insert location to the response of
IDENTIFY_SYSTEM, and adds result sets containing start
and stop location of backups to BASE_BACKUP responses.
Prior to 9.0, restartpoints never created, deleted, or recycled WAL
files, but now they can. This code makes log_checkpoints treat
checkpoints and restartpoints symmetrically. It also adjusts up
the documentation of the parameter to mention restartpoints.
Fujii Masao. Docs by me, as suggested by Itagaki Takahiro.
This allows the language-specific try/catch construct to catch and
handle exceptions arising from SPI calls, matching the behavior of
other PLs.
As an additional bonus you no longer get all the ugly "unrecognized
error in PLy_spi_execute_query" errors.
Jan Urbański, reviewed by Steve Singer
Unlike Btree-based LIKE optimization, this works for non-left-anchored
search patterns. The effectiveness of the search depends on how many
trigrams can be extracted from the pattern. (The worst case, with no
trigrams, degrades to a full-table scan, so this isn't a panacea. But
it can be very useful.)
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Jan Urbanski
Previously reported as ERRCODE_ADMIN_SHUTDOWN, this case is now
reported as ERRCODE_T_R_DATABASE_DROPPED. No message text change.
Unlikely to happen on most servers, so low impact change to allow
session poolers to correctly handle this situation.
Tatsuo Ishii, edits by me, review by Robert Haas
Document how to build 64 bit Windows binaries using the MinGW64 tool set.
Remove recommendation against using Mingw as a build platform.
Be more specific about when Cygwin is useful and when it's not, in
particular note its usefulness for running psql, and
add a note about building on Cygwin in non-C locales.
Per recent discussions.
Operation", merged from upgrade sections in "Installation from Source
Code" and "Backup and Restore". This now gives a single place for all
upgrade information.
With this patch, pg_basebackup doesn't write a backup_label file in the
data directory, so it doesn't interfere with a pg_start/stop_backup() based
backup anymore. backup_label is still included in the backup, but it is
injected directly into the tar stream.
Heikki Linnakangas, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Magnus Hagander.
When included, this makes the base backup a complete working
"clone" of the initial database, ready to have a postmaster
started against it without the need to set up any log archiving
or similar.
Magnus Hagander, reviewed by Fujii Masao and Heikki Linnakangas
Although this improves the style, an ulterior motive is to keep the two
table links from breaking across lines in PDF output, per complaint from
Josh Kupershmidt.
The link to the CREATE CONVERSION manual page was split across a page
boundary in the PDF output, leading to "\pdfendlink ended up in different
nesting level than \pdfstartlink" error while building PDFs.
It wouldn't be worth changing text that's undergoing active editing to
avoid this, since other editing might result in moving the link away from
the page end anyway. But this paragraph has been static for a long time,
so might as well fix it to prevent it from being an issue in future.
Heikki Linnakangas