Re: New vacuum option to do only freezing

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 2019-Apr-16, Robert Haas wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 15, 2019 at 9:07 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> If we're failing to remove it, and it's below the desired freeze
>>> horizon, then we'd darn well better freeze it instead, no?

>> I don't know that that's safe. IIRC, the freeze code doesn't cope
>> nicely with being given a tuple that actually ought to have been
>> deleted. It'll just freeze it anyway, which is obviously bad.

> Umm, but if we fail to freeze it, we'll leave a tuple around that's
> below the relfrozenxid for the table, causing later pg_commit to be
> truncated and error messages saying that the tuple cannot be read, no?

Yeah. If you think that it's unsafe to freeze the tuple, then this
entire patch is ill-conceived and needs to be reverted. I don't
know how much more plainly I can put it: index_cleanup cannot be a
license to ignore the freeze horizon. (Indeed, I do not quite see
what the point of the feature is otherwise. Why would you run a
vacuum with this option at all, if not to increase the table's
relfrozenxid? But you can *not* advance relfrozenxid if you left
old XIDs behind.)

regards, tom lane