Re: logical changeset generation v3 - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On 2012-11-21 15:28:30 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 20, 2012 at 8:22 PM, Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com>wrote:
>
> > On 2012-11-20 09:30:40 +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:

> > > Btw, here are some extra comments based on my progress, hope it will be
> > > useful for other people playing around with your patches.
> > > 1) Necessary to install the contrib module test_decoding on server side
> > or
> > > the test case will not work.
> > > 2) Obtention of the following logs on server:
> > > LOG:  forced to assume catalog changes for xid 1370 because it was
> > running
> > > to early
> > > WARNING:  ABORT 1370
> > > Actually I saw that there are many warnings like this.
> >
> > Those aren't unexpected. Perhaps I should not make it a warning then...
> >
> A NOTICE would be more adapted, a WARNING means that something that may
> endanger the system has happened, but as far as I understand from your
> explanation this is not the case.

I think it should go DEBUG2 or so once were a bit more confident about
the code.

> > A short explanation:
> >
> > We can only decode tuples we see in the WAL when we already have a
> > timetravel catalog snapshot before that transaction started. To build
> > such a snapshot we need to collect information about committed which
> > changed the catalog. Unfortunately we can't diagnose whether a txn
> > changed the catalog without a snapshot so we just assume all committed
> > ones do - it just costs a bit of memory. Thats the background of the
> > "forced to assume catalog changes for ..." message.
> >
> OK, so this snapshot only needs to include the XIDs of transactions that
> have modified the catalogs. Do I get it right? This way you are able to
> fetch the correct relation definition for replication decoding.

Yes. We only carry those between (recenXmin, newestCatalogModifyingTxn),
so its not all of them. Normal snapshots carry all in-progress
transactionids instead of the committed ones, but that would have been
far more in our case (only a minority of txn's touch the catalog) and it
has problems with subtransaction tracking.

> Just thinking but... It looks to be a waste to store the transactions XIDs
> of all the committed transactions, but on the other hand there is no way to
> track the XIDs of transactions that modified a catalog in current core
> code. So yes this approach is better as refining the transaction XID
> tracking for snapshot reconstruction is something that could be improved
> later. Those are only thoughts though...

We actually only track xids of catalog modifying transactions once we
hit the CONSISTENT state. Before the initial snapshot we can't detect
that.