Re: Hot Standby 0.2.1

On Tue, 2009-09-22 at 11:04 +0300, Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> >
> > By me, yes. WAL replay does not require a table lock to progress. Any
> > changes are protected with block-level locks. It does acquire a table
> > lock and cancel conflicting queries when it is about to replay something
> > that would cause a query to explode, such as dropping a table, as
> > explained in docs.
>
> That is rather surprising. You can't get that result in a normal server,
> which I think is enough of a reason to disallow it. If you do LOCK TABLE
> ACCESS EXCLUSIVE, you wouldn't expect the contents to change under your
> nose.

OK, "normality" is a reasonable argument against. So (1) is only a
partial implementation of serializing the table.

> > So not a bug, but just one of many possible behaviours we could enforce.
> > 1. Allow AccessExclusiveLocks yet they do not interrupt WAL replay
> > 2. Allow AccessExclusiveLocks but have them pause WAL replay
> > 3. Disallow AccessExclusiveLocks (and so LOCK TABLE is effectively a
> > no-op because it will not be able to serialize anything)
> >
> > So the patch originally implemented (3) but now implements (1).
> >
> > I would say that (2) is very undesirable because it puts WAL replay in
> > the control of non-superusers. That could mean LOCK TABLE implicitly
> > alters the high availability of the standby, and might even be used
> > maliciously to do that.
>
> I don't see a problem with (2) as long as the locker is kicked out after
> max_standby_delay, like a long-running query. That's what I would
> expect. I'm fine with (3) as well, but (1) does seem rather suprising
> behavior.

(2) gives other problems because it would force us to check for
conflicting locks for each heap & index WAL record to ensure that the
lock was honoured. We could optimize that but it's still going to cost.

I'd rather leave things at (3) for now and wait for further feedback.
"Start strict, relax later".

--
Simon Riggs www.2ndQuadrant.com