Re: Reconcile stats in find_tabstat_entry() and get rid of PgStat_BackendFunctionEntry

On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 11:32:56AM +0100, Drouvot, Bertrand wrote:
> On 3/16/23 7:29 AM, Michael Paquier wrote:
>> From what I get with this change, the number of tuples changed by DMLs
>> have their computations done a bit earlier,
>
> Thanks for looking at it!
>
> Right, but note this is in a dedicated new tablestatus (created
> within find_tabstat_entry()).

Sure, however it copies the pointer of the PgStat_TableXactStatus from
tabentry, isn't it? This means that it keeps a reference of the chain
of subtransactions. It does not matter for the functions but it could
for out-of-core callers of find_tabstat_entry(), no? Perhaps you are
right and that's not worth worrying, still I don't feel particularly
confident that this is the best approach we can take.

>> How much do we need to care about the remaining two callers
>> pg_stat_get_xact_blocks_fetched() and pg_stat_get_xact_blocks_hit()?
>
> Regarding pg_stat_get_xact_blocks_fetched() and pg_stat_get_xact_blocks_hit()
> the callers (if any) are outside of the core PG (as from what I can
> see they are not used at all).
>
> I don't think we should pay any particular attention to those 2 ones
> as anyway nothing prevent the 7 others to be called outside of the
> pg_stat_xact_all_tables view.

I am not quite sure, TBH. Did you look at the difference with a long
chain of subtrans, like savepoints? The ODBC driver "loves" producing
a lot of savepoints, for example.

>> It would feel a bit safer to me to document that find_tabstat_entry()
>> is currently only used for this xact system view.. The extra
>> computation could lead to surprises, actually, if this routine is used
>> outside this context? Perhaps that's OK, but it does not give me a
>> warm feeling, just to reshape three functions of pgstatfuncs.c with
>> macros.
>
> That's a fair point. On the other hand those 9 functions (which can
> all be used outside of the pg_stat_xact_all_tables view) are not
> documented, so I'm not sure this is that much of a concern (and if
> we think it is we still gave the option to add an extra flag to
> indicate whether or not the extra computation is needed.)

That's not quite exact, I think. The first 7 functions are used in a
system catalog that is documented. Still we have a problem here. I
can actually see a few projects relying on these two functions while
looking a bit around, so they are used. And the issue comes from
ddfc2d9, that has removed these functions from the documentation
ignoring that they are used in no system catalogs. I think that we
should fix that and re-add the two missing functions with a proper
description in the docs, at least? There is no trace of them.
Perhaps the ones exposted through pg_stat_xact_all_tables are fine if
not listed.
--
Michael