On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 1:02 PM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Florian Pflug <f...@phlo.org> writes: >> On Oct19, 2011, at 18:17 , Tom Lane wrote: >>> AFAICS we should just throw an error if SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT is done >>> in a transaction with those properties. Has anyone got another >>> interpretation? Would it be better to silently ignore the DEFERRABLE >>> property? > >> Hm, both features are meant to be used by pg_dump, so think we should >> make the combination work. It'd say SET TRANSACTION SNAPSHOT should throw >> an error only if the transaction is marked READ ONLY DEFERRABLE *and* >> the provided snapshot isn't "safe". > > Um, no, I don't think so. It would be sensible for the "leader" > transaction to use READ ONLY DEFERRABLE and then export the snapshot it > got (possibly after waiting). It doesn't follow that the child > transactions should use DEFERRABLE too. They're not going to wait. > >> This allows a deferrable snapshot to be used on a second connection ( >> by e.g. pg_dump), and still be marked as DEFERRABLE. If we throw an >> error unconditionally, the second connection has to import the snapshot >> without marking it DEFERRABLE, which I think has consequences for >> performance. > > No, I don't believe that either. AIUI the performance benefit comes if > the snapshot is recognized as safe. DEFERRABLE only means to keep > retrying until you get a safe one. This is nonsense when you're > importing the snapshot.
I think the requirement is that we need to do the appropriate push-ups so that the people who import the snapshot know that it's safe, and that the SSI stuff can all be skipped. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers