Re: CREATE INDEX and HOT (was Question: pg_class attributes and race conditions ?)

"Pavan Deolasee" <pavan(dot)deolasee(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> While creating an index, if a HEAP_ONLY tuple is found,
> CREATE INDEX [CONCURRENTLY] fails with an error and the
> user needs to SET HOT OFF and then try again. While turning
> HOT off, the entire table is CHILLed, holding AccessExclusive
> lock on the table. Once the new index is created, user
> can turn HOT on again.

It hardly seems acceptable to require exclusive lock to chill a table.
In production situations, knowing that you'd have to do that to do
index maintenance on a large table would probably scare you off of
ever enabling the feature at all. Last year we were getting beaten up
about how it wasn't acceptable for CREATE INDEX to lock out writes
for a long time; how is it suddenly acceptable to need to lock out
both reads and writes for a long time before you can even think
about creating an index?

regards, tom lane