The old coding was using a regular snapshot, referenced elsewhere, that was
subject to having its command counter updated. Fix by creating a private copy
of the snapshot exclusively for the cursor.
Backpatch to 8.4, which is when the bug was introduced during the snapshot
management rewrite.
non-writable large objects need to have their snapshots registered on the
transaction resowner, not the current portal's, because it must persist until
the large object is closed (which the portal does not). Also, ensure that the
serializable snapshot is recorded by the transaction resource owner too, even
when a subtransaction has changed the current resource owner before
serializable is taken.
Per bug reports from Pavan Deolasee.
by hand. As an added bonus, the new code is smaller and more understandable,
and the ugly loops are gone.
This had been discussed all along but never implemented. It became clear that
it really needed to be fixed after a bug report by Pavan Deolasee.
GetOldestXmin() instead of RecentGlobalXmin; this is safer because we do not
depend on the latter being correctly set elsewhere, and while it is more
expensive, this code path is not performance-critical. This is a real
risk for autovacuum, because it can execute whole cycles without doing
a single vacuum, which would mean that RecentGlobalXmin would stay at its
initialization value, FirstNormalTransactionId, causing a bogus value to be
inserted in pg_database. This bug could explain some recent reports of
failure to truncate pg_clog.
At the same time, change the initialization of RecentGlobalXmin to
InvalidTransactionId, and ensure that it's set to something else whenever
it's going to be used. Using it as FirstNormalTransactionId in HOT page
pruning could incur in data loss. InitPostgres takes care of setting it
to a valid value, but the extra checks are there to prevent "special"
backends from behaving in unusual ways.
Per Tom Lane's detailed problem dissection in 29544.1221061979@sss.pgh.pa.us
CopySnapshot, per Neil Conway. Also add a comment about the assumption in
GetSnapshotData that the argument is statically allocated.
Also, fix some more typos in comments in snapmgr.c.
There are two ways to track a snapshot: there's the "registered" list, which
is used for arbitrary long-lived snapshots; and there's the "active stack",
which is used for the snapshot that is considered "active" at any time.
This also allows users of snapshots to stop worrying about snapshot memory
allocation and freeing, and about using PG_TRY blocks around ActiveSnapshot
assignment. This is all done automatically now.
As a consequence, this allows us to reset MyProc->xmin when there are no
more snapshots registered in the current backend, reducing the impact that
long-running transactions have on VACUUM.
