Re: Faster "SET search_path"

On Sat, Jul 29, 2023 at 08:59:01AM -0700, Jeff Davis wrote:
> 0001: Transform the settings in proconfig into a List for faster
> processing. This is simple and speeds up any proconfig setting.

This looks straightforward. It might be worth combining the common parts
of ProcessGUCArray() and TransformGUCArray() if there is a clean way to do
so.

> 0002: Introduce CheckIdentifierString(), which is a faster version of
> SplitIdentifierString() that only validates, and can be used in
> check_search_path().

This also looks straightforward. And I'd make the same comment as above
for SplitIdentifierString() and CheckIdentifierString(). Perhaps we could
have folks set SplitIdentifierString's namelist argument to NULL to
indicate that it only needs to validate.

> 0003: Cache of previous search_path settings. The key is the raw
> namespace_search_path string and the role OID, and it caches the
> computed OID list. Changes to the search_path setting or the role can
> retrieve the cached OID list as long as nothing else invalidates the
> cache (changes to the temp schema or a syscache invalidation of
> pg_namespace or pg_role).

At a glance, this looks pretty reasonable, too.

> One behavior change in 0003 is that retrieving a cached OID list
> doesn't call InvokeNamespaceSearchHook(). It would be easy enough to
> disable caching when a hook exists, but I didn't see a reason to expect
> that "SET search_path" must invoke that hook each time. Invoking it
> when computing for the first time, or after a real invalidation, seemed
> fine to me. Feedback on that is welcome.

Could a previously cached list be used to circumvent a hook that was just
reconfigured to ERROR for certain namespaces? If something like that is
possible, then we might need to disable the cache when there is a hook.

--
Nathan Bossart
Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com