Allow ATTACH PARTITION with only ShareUpdateExclusiveLock.
We still require AccessExclusiveLock on the partition itself, because
otherwise an insert that violates the newly-imposed partition
constraint could be in progress at the same time that we're changing
that constraint; only the lock level on the parent relation is
weakened.
To make this safe, we have to cope with (at least) three separate
problems. First, relevant DDL might commit while we're in the process
of building a PartitionDesc. If so, find_inheritance_children() might
see a new partition while the RELOID system cache still has the old
partition bound cached, and even before invalidation messages have
been queued. To fix that, if we see that the pg_class tuple seems to
be missing or to have a null relpartbound, refetch the value directly
from the table. We can't get the wrong value, because DETACH PARTITION
still requires AccessExclusiveLock throughout; if we ever want to
change that, this will need more thought. In testing, I found it quite
difficult to hit even the null-relpartbound case; the race condition
is extremely tight, but the theoretical risk is there.
Second, successive calls to RelationGetPartitionDesc might not return
the same answer. The query planner will get confused if lookup up the
PartitionDesc for a particular relation does not return a consistent
answer for the entire duration of query planning. Likewise, query
execution will get confused if the same relation seems to have a
different PartitionDesc at different times. Invent a new
PartitionDirectory concept and use it to ensure consistency. This
ensures that a single invocation of either the planner or the executor
sees the same view of the PartitionDesc from beginning to end, but it
does not guarantee that the planner and the executor see the same
view. Since this allows pointers to old PartitionDesc entries to
survive even after a relcache rebuild, also postpone removing the old
PartitionDesc entry until we're certain no one is using it.
For the most part, it seems to be OK for the planner and executor to
have different views of the PartitionDesc, because the executor will
just ignore any concurrently added partitions which were unknown at
plan time; those partitions won't be part of the inheritance
expansion, but invalidation messages will trigger replanning at some
point. Normally, this happens by the time the very next command is
executed, but if the next command acquires no locks and executes a
prepared query, it can manage not to notice until a new transaction is
started. We might want to tighten that up, but it's material for a
separate patch. There would still be a small window where a query
that started just after an ATTACH PARTITION command committed might
fail to notice its results -- but only if the command starts before
the commit has been acknowledged to the user. All in all, the warts
here around serializability seem small enough to be worth accepting
for the considerable advantage of being able to add partitions without
a full table lock.
Although in general the consequences of new partitions showing up
between planning and execution are limited to the query not noticing
the new partitions, run-time partition pruning will get confused in
that case, so that's the third problem that this patch fixes.
Run-time partition pruning assumes that indexes into the PartitionDesc
are stable between planning and execution. So, add code so that if
new partitions are added between plan time and execution time, the
indexes stored in the subplan_map[] and subpart_map[] arrays within
the plan's PartitionedRelPruneInfo get adjusted accordingly. There
does not seem to be a simple way to generalize this scheme to cope
with partitions that are removed, mostly because they could then get
added back again with different bounds, but it works OK for added
partitions.
This code does not try to ensure that every backend participating in
a parallel query sees the same view of the PartitionDesc. That
currently doesn't matter, because we never pass PartitionDesc
indexes between backends. Each backend will ignore the concurrently
added partitions which it notices, and it doesn't matter if different
backends are ignoring different sets of concurrently added partitions.
If in the future that matters, for example because we allow writes in
parallel query and want all participants to do tuple routing to the same
set of partitions, the PartitionDirectory concept could be improved to
share PartitionDescs across backends. There is a draft patch to
serialize and restore PartitionDescs on the thread where this patch
was discussed, which may be a useful place to start.
Patch by me. Thanks to Alvaro Herrera, David Rowley, Simon Riggs,
Amit Langote, and Michael Paquier for discussion, and to Alvaro
Herrera for some review.
projects / postgresql / commit