Re: Idea for getting rid of VACUUM FREEZE on cold pages

So I think the scheme in the original post of this thread is workable.
Not as described but could be made to work. In which case I think it's
preferable to a freeze map -- which I had previously assumed we would
need eventually.

The problem with the scheme originally described is that it assumed
you could have an cycle counter and then arrange that all the xids on
the page are within that cycle. That doesn't work because you could
easily have two live xids on the page that belong to two cycles -- one
FirstNormalTransactionId and one MaxTransactionId.

I think to make it work you need to store a whole 64-bit reference
transaction id consisting of both a cycle counter and a transaction
id. The invariant for the page is that every xid on the page can be
compared to that reference transaction id using normal transactionid
semantics. Actually I think the easiest way to do that is to set it to
the oldest xid on the page. The first thing to do before comparing any
transaction id on the page with a real transaction id would be to
figure out whether the reference xid is comparable to the live xid,
which if it's the oldest xid on the page implies they'll all be
comparable.

The way to maintain that invariant would be that any xid insertion on
the page must advance the reference xid if it's not comparable to the
newly inserted xid. It has to be advanced to the oldest xid that's
still comparable with the newly inserted xid. Any xids on the page
that are older than the new refernce xid have to be frozen or removed.
I'm not sure how to do that without keeping clog forever though.