A transaction can export a snapshot with pg_export_snapshot(), and then
others can import it with SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT. The data does not
leave the server so there are not security issues. A snapshot can only
be imported while the exporting transaction is still running, and there
are some other restrictions.
I'm not totally convinced that we've covered all the bases for SSI (true
serializable) mode, but it works fine for lesser isolation modes.
Joachim Wieland, reviewed by Marko Tiikkaja, and rather heavily modified
by Tom Lane
In REPEATABLE READ (nee SERIALIZABLE) mode, an attempt to do
GetTransactionSnapshot() between AbortTransaction and CleanupTransaction
failed, because GetTransactionSnapshot would recompute the transaction
snapshot (which is already wrong, given the isolation mode) and then
re-register it in the TopTransactionResourceOwner, leading to an Assert
because the TopTransactionResourceOwner should be empty of resources after
AbortTransaction. This is the root cause of bug #6218 from Yamamoto
Takashi. While changing plancache.c to avoid requesting a snapshot when
handling a ROLLBACK masks the problem, I think this is really a snapmgr.c
bug: it's lower-level than the resource manager mechanism and should not be
shutting itself down before we unwind resource manager resources. However,
just postponing the release of the transaction snapshot until cleanup time
didn't work because of the circular dependency with
TopTransactionResourceOwner. Fix by managing the internal reference to
that snapshot manually instead of depending on TopTransactionResourceOwner.
This saves a few cycles as well as making the module layering more
straightforward. predicate.c's dependencies on TopTransactionResourceOwner
go away too.
I think this is a longstanding bug, but there's no evidence that it's more
than a latent bug, so it doesn't seem worth any risk of back-patching.
As Tom Lane pointed out, "const Relation foo" doesn't guarantee that you
can't modify the data the "foo" pointer points to. It just means that you
can't change the pointer to point to something else within the function,
which is not very useful.
snapshots, like in REINDEX, are basically non-transactional operations. The
DDL operation itself might participate in SSI, but there's separate
functions for that.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, with some changes by me.
Truncating or dropping a table is treated like deletion of all tuples, and
check for conflicts accordingly. If a table is clustered or rewritten by
ALTER TABLE, all predicate locks on the heap are promoted to relation-level
locks, because the tuple or page ids of any existing tuples will change and
won't be valid after rewriting the table. Arguably ALTER TABLE should be
treated like a mass-UPDATE of every row, but if you e.g change the datatype
of a column, you could also argue that it's just a change to the physical
layout, not a logical change. Reindexing promotes all locks on the index to
relation-level lock on the heap.
Kevin Grittner, with a lot of cosmetic changes by me.
On further analysis, it turns out that it is not needed to duplicate predicate
locks to the new row version at update, the lock on the version that the
transaction saw as visible is enough. However, there was a different bug in
the code that checks for dangerous structures when a new rw-conflict happens.
Fix that bug, and remove all the row-version chaining related code.
Kevin Grittner & Dan Ports, with some comment editorialization by me.
than doing it aggressively whenever the tail-XID pointer is advanced, because
this way we don't need to do it while holding SerializableXactHashLock.
This also fixes bug #5915 spotted by YAMAMOTO Takashi, and removes an
obsolete comment spotted by Kevin Grittner.
Until now, our Serializable mode has in fact been what's called Snapshot
Isolation, which allows some anomalies that could not occur in any
serialized ordering of the transactions. This patch fixes that using a
method called Serializable Snapshot Isolation, based on research papers by
Michael J. Cahill (see README-SSI for full references). In Serializable
Snapshot Isolation, transactions run like they do in Snapshot Isolation,
but a predicate lock manager observes the reads and writes performed and
aborts transactions if it detects that an anomaly might occur. This method
produces some false positives, ie. it sometimes aborts transactions even
though there is no anomaly.
To track reads we implement predicate locking, see storage/lmgr/predicate.c.
Whenever a tuple is read, a predicate lock is acquired on the tuple. Shared
memory is finite, so when a transaction takes many tuple-level locks on a
page, the locks are promoted to a single page-level lock, and further to a
single relation level lock if necessary. To lock key values with no matching
tuple, a sequential scan always takes a relation-level lock, and an index
scan acquires a page-level lock that covers the search key, whether or not
there are any matching keys at the moment.
A predicate lock doesn't conflict with any regular locks or with another
predicate locks in the normal sense. They're only used by the predicate lock
manager to detect the danger of anomalies. Only serializable transactions
participate in predicate locking, so there should be no extra overhead for
for other transactions.
Predicate locks can't be released at commit, but must be remembered until
all the transactions that overlapped with it have completed. That means that
we need to remember an unbounded amount of predicate locks, so we apply a
lossy but conservative method of tracking locks for committed transactions.
If we run short of shared memory, we overflow to a new "pg_serial" SLRU
pool.
We don't currently allow Serializable transactions in Hot Standby mode.
That would be hard, because even read-only transactions can cause anomalies
that wouldn't otherwise occur.
Serializable isolation mode now means the new fully serializable level.
Repeatable Read gives you the old Snapshot Isolation level that we have
always had.
Kevin Grittner and Dan Ports, reviewed by Jeff Davis, Heikki Linnakangas and
Anssi Kääriäinen
