On 2/14/07, Tom Lane <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Heikki Linnakangas <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > What's the verdict on relaxing the "live tuple's ctid doesn't change > rule"? I think that's unacceptable; it is known that that will break the ODBC and JDBC drivers, as well as any other programs that make use of the ctid for re-finding a tuple they read earlier in the same transaction. We have not only never deprecated client-side use of ctid for this, but actively encouraged it, for instance by going out of our way to support fast access for queries "WHERE ctid = 'constant'". What's more, your proposal would break plain old UPDATE and DELETE, as well as SELECT FOR UPDATE, none of which promise to hold a pin continuously on every page containing a tuple they might decide to revisit (by ctid) later. Are you prepared to disallow hash join and sort/merge join in all such queries?
Not that I am suggesting we do this, but I believe we had some solution to this problem in the earlier version of HOT. The live tuple when copied-back to the root tuple, the tuple is marked with a HEAP_COPIED_BACK flag. HeapTupleSatisfiesUpdate() checks for this flag and if set returns a new return code, HeapTupleCopiedBack. heap_update() returns the same to ExecUpdate along with the ctid of the root tuple. The UPDATE/DELETE operation then retried on the root tuple, very similar to read-committed update/delete. The xmax of the copied-back tuple is set so that its not vacuumed away until all the current transactions are completed. Though I have tested this patch several times and it seems to work fine, I probably don''t have insight into the code as much others on this list has. So if someone wants to take a look and see if it would work fine, I would be more than happy to post the latest HOT patch (older design). Thanks, Pavan -- EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com
