When pg_logical_slot_get_changes(...) sets confirmed_flush_lsn to the point at
which replay stopped, it doesn't dirty the replication slot.  So if the replay
didn't cause restart_lsn or catalog_xmin to change as well, this change will
not get written out to disk. Even on a clean shutdown.

If Pg crashes or restarts, a subsequent pg_logical_slot_get_changes(...) call
will see the same changes already replayed since it uses the slot's
confirmed_flush_lsn as the start point for fetching changes. The caller can't
specify a start LSN when using the SQL interface.

Mark the slot as dirty after reading changes using the SQL interface so that
users won't see repeated changes after a clean shutdown. Repeated changes still
occur when using the walsender interface or after an unclean shutdown.

Craig Ringer

This reverts commits f07d18b6, 82c83b33, 3a3b3090, and
24c5f1a1.

This feature has shown enough immaturity that it was deemed better to
rip it out before rushing some more fixes at the last minute.  There are
discussions on larger changes in this area for the next release.

Back in 3b02ea4f I added some comments in various places to explain
how logical decoding and other things worked.  Not all of the changes
were welcome, because they were misleading or wrong.  This changes them
a little bit to make them more accurate.

Some other comments are also changed to be more accurate.  Also, fix a
bunch of typos.

Author: Álvaro Herrera, Craig Ringer

Andres Freund reviewed some parts of this.

API and mechanism to allow generic messages to be inserted into WAL that are
intended to be read by logical decoding plugins. This commit adds an optional
new callback to the logical decoding API.

Messages are either text or bytea. Messages can be transactional, or not, and
are identified by a prefix to allow multiple concurrent decoding plugins.

(Not to be confused with Generic WAL records, which are intended to allow crash
recovery of extensible objects.)

Author: Petr Jelinek and Andres Freund
Reviewers: Artur Zakirov, Tomas Vondra, Simon Riggs
Discussion: 5685F999.6010202@2ndquadrant.com

When decoding from a logical slot, it's necessary for xlog reading to be
able to read xlog from historical (i.e. not current) timelines;
otherwise, decoding fails after failover, because the archives are in
the historical timeline.  This is required to make "failover logical
slots" possible; it currently has no other use, although theoretically
it could be used by an extension that creates a slot on a standby and
continues to replay from the slot when the standby is promoted.

This commit includes a module in src/test/modules with functions to
manipulate the slots (which is not otherwise possible in SQL code) in
order to enable testing, and a new test in src/test/recovery to ensure
that the behavior is as expected.

Author: Craig Ringer
Reviewed-By: Oleksii Kliukin, Andres Freund, Petr Jelínek

Some minor tweaks and comment additions, for cleanliness sake and to
avoid having the upcoming timeline-following patch be polluted with
unrelated cleanup.

Extracted from a larger patch by Craig Ringer, reviewed by Andres
Freund, with some additions by myself.

Previously we didn’t have a generic WAL page read callback function,
surprisingly. Logical decoding has logical_read_local_xlog_page(), which was
actually generic, so move that to xlogfunc.c and rename to
read_local_xlog_page().
Maintain logical_read_local_xlog_page() so existing callers still work.

As requested by Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera and Andres Freund

A scan for missed proisstrict markings in the core code turned up
these functions:

brin_summarize_new_values
pg_stat_reset_single_table_counters
pg_stat_reset_single_function_counters
pg_create_logical_replication_slot
pg_create_physical_replication_slot
pg_drop_replication_slot

The first three of these take OID, so a null argument will normally look
like a zero to them, resulting in "ERROR: could not open relation with OID
0" for brin_summarize_new_values, and no action for the pg_stat_reset_XXX
functions.  The other three will dump core on a null argument, though this
is mitigated by the fact that they won't do so until after checking that
the caller is superuser or has rolreplication privilege.

In addition, the pg_logical_slot_get/peek[_binary]_changes family was
intentionally marked nonstrict, but failed to make nullness checks on all
the arguments; so again a null-pointer-dereference crash is possible but
only for superusers and rolreplication users.

Add the missing ARGISNULL checks to the latter functions, and mark the
former functions as strict in pg_proc.  Make that change in the back
branches too, even though we can't force initdb there, just so that
installations initdb'd in future won't have the issue.  Since none of these
bugs rise to the level of security issues (and indeed the pg_stat_reset_XXX
functions hardly misbehave at all), it seems sufficient to do this.

In addition, fix some order-of-operations oddities in the slot_get_changes
family, mostly cosmetic, but not the part that moves the function's last
few operations into the PG_TRY block.  As it stood, there was significant
risk for an error to exit without clearing historical information from
the system caches.

The slot_get_changes bugs go back to 9.4 where that code was introduced.
Back-patch appropriate subsets of the pg_proc changes into all active
branches, as well.

Backpatch certain files through 9.1

Message style, plurals, quoting, spelling, consistency with similar
messages

Use "a" and "an" correctly, mostly in comments. Two error messages were
also fixed (they were just elogs, so no translation work required). Two
function comments in pg_proc.h were also fixed. Etsuro Fujita reported one
of these, but I found a lot more with grep.

Also fix a few other typos spotted while grepping for the a/an typos.
For example, "consists out of ..." -> "consists of ...". Plus a "though"/
"through" mixup reported by Euler Taveira.

Many of these typos were in old code, which would be nice to backpatch to
make future backpatching easier. But much of the code was new, and I didn't
feel like crafting separate patches for each branch. So no backpatching.

Backpatch certain files through 9.0

This reverts commit 1826987a.

The overall design was deemed unacceptable, in discussion following the
previous commit message; we might find some parts of it still
salvageable, but I don't want to be on the hook for fixing it, so let's
wait until we have a new patch.

The previous representation using a boolean column for each attribute
would not scale as well as we want to add further attributes.

Extra auxilliary functions are added to go along with this change, to
make up for the lost convenience of access of the old representation.

Catalog version bumped due to change in catalogs and the new functions.

Author: Adam Brightwell, minor tweaks by Álvaro
Reviewed by: Stephen Frost, Andres Freund, Álvaro Herrera

Each WAL record now carries information about the modified relation and
block(s) in a standardized format. That makes it easier to write tools that
need that information, like pg_rewind, prefetching the blocks to speed up
recovery, etc.

There's a whole new API for building WAL records, replacing the XLogRecData
chains used previously. The new API consists of XLogRegister* functions,
which are called for each buffer and chunk of data that is added to the
record. The new API also gives more control over when a full-page image is
written, by passing flags to the XLogRegisterBuffer function.

This also simplifies the XLogReadBufferForRedo() calls. The function can dig
the relation and block number from the WAL record, so they no longer need to
be passed as arguments.

For the convenience of redo routines, XLogReader now disects each WAL record
after reading it, copying the main data part and the per-block data into
MAXALIGNed buffers. The data chunks are not aligned within the WAL record,
but the redo routines can assume that the pointers returned by XLogRecGet*
functions are. Redo routines are now passed the XLogReaderState, which
contains the record in the already-disected format, instead of the plain
XLogRecord.

The new record format also makes the fixed size XLogRecord header smaller,
by removing the xl_len field. The length of the "main data" portion is now
stored at the end of the WAL record, and there's a separate header after
XLogRecord for it. The alignment padding at the end of XLogRecord is also
removed. This compansates for the fact that the new format would otherwise
be more bulky than the old format.

Reviewed by Andres Freund, Amit Kapila, Michael Paquier, Alvaro Herrera,
Fujii Masao.

Also improve related error message as it contributed to the confusion.

Discussion: CAB7nPqQrqFzjqCjxu4GZzTrD9kpj6HMn9G5aOOMwt1WZ8NfqeA@mail.gmail.com,
    CAB7nPqQXc_+g95zWnqaa=mVQ4d3BVRs6T41frcEYi2ocUrR3+A@mail.gmail.com

Per discussion between Michael Paquier, Robert Haas and Andres Freund

Backpatch to 9.4 where logical decoding was introduced.

Michael Paquier

When reading large amounts of preexisting WAL during logical decoding
using the SQL interface we possibly could fail to check interrupts in
due time. Similarly the same could happen on systems with a very high
WAL volume while creating a new logical replication slot, independent
of the used interface.

Previously these checks where only performed in xlogreader's read_page
callbacks, while waiting for new WAL to be produced. That's not
sufficient though, if there's never a need to wait.  Walsender's send
loop already contains a interrupt check.

Backpatch to 9.4 where the logical decoding feature was introduced.

This includes removing tabs after periods in C comments, which was
applied to back branches, so this change should not effect backpatching.

This feature, building on previous commits, allows the write-ahead log
stream to be decoded into a series of logical changes; that is,
inserts, updates, and deletes and the transactions which contain them.
It is capable of handling decoding even across changes to the schema
of the effected tables.  The output format is controlled by a
so-called "output plugin"; an example is included.  To make use of
this in a real replication system, the output plugin will need to be
modified to produce output in the format appropriate to that system,
and to perform filtering.

Currently, information can be extracted from the logical decoding
system only via SQL; future commits will add the ability to stream
changes via walsender.

Andres Freund, with review and other contributions from many other
people, including Álvaro Herrera, Abhijit Menon-Sen, Peter Gheogegan,
Kevin Grittner, Robert Haas, Heikki Linnakangas, Fujii Masao, Abhijit
Menon-Sen, Michael Paquier, Simon Riggs, Craig Ringer, and Steve
Singer.