Re: Advice on MyXactMade* flags, MyLastRecPtr, pendingDeletes and lazy XID assignment

"Florian G. Pflug" <fgp(at)phlo(dot)org> writes:
> I propose to do the following in my lazy XID assignment patch - can
> anyone see a hole in that?

Cleaning up this area seems like a good idea. Just FYI, one reason why
there are so many LastRec pointer variables is that the WAL record
format used to include a back-link to the previous record of the same
transaction, so we needed to track that location. Since that's gone,
simplification is definitely possible. A lot of the other behavior
you're looking at "just grew" as incremental optimizations added over
time.

One comment is that at the time we make an entry into smgr's
pending-deletes list, I think we might not have acquired an XID yet
--- if I understand your patch correctly, a CREATE TABLE would acquire
an XID when it makes its first catalog insertion, and that happens
after creating the on-disk table file. So it seems like a good idea
for smgr itself to trigger acquisition of an XID before it makes a
pending-deletes entry. This ensures that you can't have a situation
where you have deletes to record and no XID; otherwise, an elog
between smgr insertion and catalog insertion would lead to just that.

> .) Rename ProcLastRecEnd to XactLastRecEnd, and reset when starting
> a new toplevel transaction.

I'm not very happy with that name for the variable, because it looks
like it might refer to the last transaction-controlled record we
emitted, rather than the last record of any type. Don't have a really
good suggestion though --- CurXactLastRecEnd is the best I can do.

One thought here is that it's not clear that we really need a concept of
transaction-controlled vs not-transaction-controlled xlog records
anymore. In CVS HEAD, the *only* difference no_tran makes is whether
to set MyLastRecPtr, and you propose removing that variable. This
seems sane to me --- the reason for having the distinction at all was
Vadim's plan to implement transaction UNDO by scanning its xlog records
backwards, and that idea is as dead as a doornail. So we could simplify
matters conceptually if we got rid of any reference to such a
distinction.

regards, tom lane