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    568d4138
    Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans. · 568d4138
    Robert Haas authored
    SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
    concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
    versions of the row.  In many cases, we work around this by requiring
    DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
    modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
    failures occur as a result.  This commit doesn't change anything
    related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
    strength reductions in the future.
    
    The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
    is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
    using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow.  However, testing
    of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
    severe except under fairly extreme workloads.  To mitigate those
    problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
    instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
    been processed.  The catcache machinery already requires that
    invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
    lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
    than scanning the catalog at all.  Thus, making snapshot reuse
    dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
    already subtly broken.
    
    Patch by me.  Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
    568d4138
    History
    Use an MVCC snapshot, rather than SnapshotNow, for catalog scans.
    Robert Haas authored
    SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
    concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
    versions of the row.  In many cases, we work around this by requiring
    DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
    modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
    failures occur as a result.  This commit doesn't change anything
    related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
    strength reductions in the future.
    
    The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
    is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
    using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow.  However, testing
    of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
    severe except under fairly extreme workloads.  To mitigate those
    problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
    instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
    been processed.  The catcache machinery already requires that
    invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
    lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
    than scanning the catalog at all.  Thus, making snapshot reuse
    dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
    already subtly broken.
    
    Patch by me.  Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.