Re: verify_heapam for sequences?

> On Aug 30, 2021, at 1:22 AM, Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
> On 26.08.21 21:02, Mark Dilger wrote:
>> I understand that sequences are really just heap tables, and since we already test corrupted heap tables, we could assume that we already have sufficient coverage. I'm not entirely comfortable with that, though, because future patch authors who modify how tables or sequences work are not necessarily going to think carefully about whether their modifications invalidate that assumption.
>
> Well, if we enabled verify_heapam to check sequences, and then someone were to change the sequence storage, a test that currently reports no corruption would probably report corruption then?

It might. More to the point, any corruption test we create now will be geared towards corrupting the page in a way that verify_heapam will detect, which will be detected whether or not the implementation of sequences changes. That kind of testing won't really do anything.

Perhaps the best we can do is to create a sequence, testing both before and after exercising it a bit. We can't properly guess which exercises (nextval, setval, etc.) will cause corruption testing to fail for some unknown future implementation change, so we just try all the obvious stuff.

The attached patch changes both contrib/amcheck/ and src/bin/pg_amcheck/ to allow checking sequences. In both cases, the changes required are fairly minor, though they both entail some documentation changes.

It seems fairly straightforward that if a user calls verify_heapam() on a sequence, then the new behavior is what they want. It is not quite so clear for pg_amcheck.

In pg_amcheck, the command-line arguments allow discriminating between tables and indexes with materialized views quietly treated as tables (which, of course, they are.) In v14, sequences were not treated as tables, nor checked at all. In this new patch, sequences are quietly treated the same way as tables. By "quietly", I mean there are no command-line switches to specifically filter them in or out separately from filtering ordinary tables.

This is a user-facing behavioral change, and the user might not be imagining sequences specifically when specifying a table name pattern that matches both tables and sequences. Do you see any problem with that? It was already true that materialized views matching a table name pattern would be checked, so this new behavior is not entirely out of line with the old behavior.

The new behavior is documented, and since I'm updating the docs, I made the behavior with respect to materialized views more explicit.