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Tom Lane authored
These flushes were added in my commit d2896a9e, which added the btree
logic that keeps a cached copy of the index metapage data in index relcache
entries.  The idea was to ensure that other backends would promptly update
their cached copies after a change.  However, this is not really necessary,
since _bt_getroot() has adequate defenses against believing a stale root
page link, and _bt_getrootheight() doesn't have to be 100% right.
Moreover, if it were necessary, a relcache flush would be an unreliable way
to do it, since the sinval mechanism believes that relcache flush requests
represent transactional updates, and therefore discards them on transaction
rollback.  Therefore, we might as well drop these flush requests and save
the time to rebuild the whole relcache entry after a metapage change.

If we ever try to support in-place truncation of btree indexes, it might
be necessary to revisit this issue so that _bt_getroot() can't get caught
by trying to follow a metapage link to a page that no longer exists.
A possible solution to that is to make use of an smgr, rather than
relcache, inval request to force other backends to discard their cached
metapages.  But for the moment this is not worth pursuing.
ac8bc3b6
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PostgreSQL Database Management System
=====================================

This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL
database management system.

PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system
that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including
transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types
and functions.  This distribution also contains C language bindings.

PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here:

	http://www.postgresql.org/download

See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install
PostgreSQL.  That file also lists supported operating systems and
hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other
software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL
system.  Changes between all PostgreSQL releases are recorded in the
file HISTORY.  Copyright and license information can be found in the
file COPYRIGHT.  A comprehensive documentation set is included in this
distribution; it can be read as described in the installation
instructions.

The latest version of this software may be obtained at
http://www.postgresql.org/download/.  For more information look at our
web site located at http://www.postgresql.org/.