Re: [PATCHES] Non-transactional pg_class, try 2

Simon Riggs <simon(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> Elsewhere, it has been discussed that we might hold the number of blocks
> in a relation in shared memory. Does that idea now fall down, or is it
> complementary to this?

It's been the case for some time that the planner uses
RelationGetNumberOfBlocks() to determine true rel size. The only reason
relpages is still stored at all is that it's used to approximate true
number of tuples via
true_ntuples = (reltuples/relpages) * true_npages
ie, assuming that the tuple density is still what it was at the last
VACUUM or ANALYZE. So you can't fool the system with a totally made-up
relation size anyway. (This too is moderately annoying for planner
testing, but it seems the only way to get the planner to react when a
table's been filled without an immediate vacuum/analyze.)

The only point of tracking rel size in shared memory would be to avoid
the costs of lseek() kernel calls in RelationGetNumberOfBlocks.

>> The main thing we are trying to accomplish here is to decouple
>> transactional and nontransactional updates to a pg_class row.

> With the goal being avoiding table bloat??

No, with the goal being correctness. If you have a freeze/unfreeze
mechanism then unfreezing a relation is an action that must NOT be
rolled back if your transaction (or any other one for that matter) later
aborts. The tuples you put into it meanwhile need to be vacuumed anyway.
So you can't mark it unfrozen in an uncommitted pg_class entry that
might never become committed.

> For me, freezing is last step before writing to WORM media, so there is
> never an unfreeze step.

That is not what Alvaro is after. Nor anyone else here. I have not
heard anyone mention WORM media for Postgres in *years*.

It strikes me though that automatic UNFREEZE isn't necessarily the
requirement. What if VACUUM FREEZE causes the table to become
effectively read-only, and you need an explicit UNFREEZE command to
put it back into a read-write state? Then UNFREEZE could be a
transactional operation, and most of these issues go away. The case
where this doesn't work conveniently is copying a frozen database
(viz template0), but maybe biting the bullet and finding a way to do
prep work in a freshly made database is the answer for that. We've
certainly seen plenty of other possible uses for post-CREATE processing
in a new database.

Another reason for not doing unfreeze automatically is that as the patch
stands, any database user can force unfreezing of any table, whether he
has any access rights on it or not (because the LockTable will happen
before we check access rights, I believe). This is probably Not Good.
Ideally I think FREEZE/UNFREEZE would be owner-permission-required.

regards, tom lane