Re: Why don't we have a small reserved OID range for patch revisions?

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 2019-02-27 22:27, Tom Lane wrote:
>>> OID collision doesn't seem to be a significant problem (for me).

>> Um, I beg to differ. It's not at all unusual for pending patches to
>> bit-rot for no reason other than suddenly getting an OID conflict.
>> I don't have to look far for a current example:

> I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but that it's not a significant
> problem overall.

I do not think you are correct. It may not be a big problem across
all our incoming patches, but that's only because most of them don't
have anything to do with hand-assigned OIDs. Among those that do,
I think there is a significant problem.

To try to quantify this a bit, I looked through v12-cycle and pending
patches that touch the catalog data.

We've only committed 12 patches adding new hand-assigned OIDs since v11
was branched off. (I suspect that's lower than in a typical cycle,
but have not attempted to quantify things further back.) Of those,
only two seem to have needed OID adjustments after initial posting,
but that's mostly because most of them were committer-originated patches
that got pushed within a week or two. That's certainly not the typical
wait time for a patch submitted by anybody else. Also, a lot of these
patches recycled OIDs that'd recently been freed by patches such as the
abstime-ectomy, which means that the amount of OID conflict created for
pending patches is probably *really* low in this cycle-so-far, compared
to our historical norms.

Of what's in the queue to be reviewed right now, there are just
20 (out of 150-plus) patches that touch the catalog/*.dat files.
I got this number by groveling through the cfbot's reports of
patch applications, to see which patches touched those files.
It might omit some patches that the cfbot failed to make sense of.
Also, I'm pretty sure that a few of these patches don't actually
assign any new OIDs but just change existing entries, or create
only entries with auto-assigned OIDs. I did not try to separate
those out, however, since the point here is to estimate for how
many patches a committer would even need to think about this.

Of those twenty patches, three have unresolved OID conflicts
right now:

multivariate MCV lists and histograms
commontype polymorphics
log10/hyper functions

Another one has recently had to resolve an OID conflict:

SortSupport implementation on inet/cdir

which is notable considering that that thread is less than three weeks
old. (The log10 and commontype threads aren't really ancient either.)

I spent some extra effort looking at the patches that both create more
than a few new OIDs and have been around for awhile:

Generic type subscripting
KNN for btree
Custom compression methods
SQL/JSON: functions
SQL/JSON: jsonpath
Generated columns
BRIN bloom indexes

The first four of those have all had to reassign OIDs during their
lifetime. jsonpath has avoided doing so by choosing fairly high-numbered
OIDs (6K range) to begin with; which I trust you will agree is a solution
that doesn't scale for long. I'm not entirely sure that the last two
haven't had to renumber OIDs; I ran out of energy before poking through
their history in detail.

In short, this situation may look fine from the perspective of a committer
with a relatively short timeline to commit, but it's pretty darn awful for
everybody else. The only way to avoid a ~ 50% failure rate is to choose
OIDs above 6K, and once everybody starts doing it like that, things are
going to get very unpleasant very quickly.

regards, tom lane