Re: Cluster and MVCC

On Fri, 2007-08-10 at 10:02 -0400, Brad Nicholson wrote:
> I just want to confirm that the cluster/MVCC issues are due to
> transaction visibility. Assuming that no concurrent access is happening
> to a given table when the cluster command is issued (when takes it
> visibility snapshot), it is safe to cluster that table. Correct?

Yes, as long as pre-existing transactions do not then access the
clustered table. If they do, rows they should have seen will now not be
visible, yet you won't get an error message to say so.

You can check this by doing something similar to...

create temporary table xids as
select transactionid from pg_stat_activity a, pg_locks l where a.procpid
= l.pid and l.transactionid is not null;

cluster ....

select 'Possible MVCC violation if ' || transactionid || ' touches
clustered table' from pg_locks where transactionid in (select
transactionid from xids);
drop table xids;

--
Simon Riggs
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com