Re: Patch: Write Amplification Reduction Method (WARM)

On Fri, Mar 31, 2017 at 6:47 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>
>
> 2. WARM is a non-optional feature which touches the on-disk format.
> There is nothing more dangerous than that. If hash indexes have bugs,
> people can avoid those bugs by not using them; there are good reasons
> to suppose that hash indexes have very few existing users. The
> expression evaluation changes, IMHO, are much more dangerous because
> everyone will be exposed to them, but they will not likely corrupt
> your data because they don't touch the on-disk format. WARM is even a
> little more dangerous than that; everyone is exposed to those bugs,
> and in the worst case they could eat your data.
>
>
Having worked on it for some time now, I can say that WARM uses pretty much
the same infrastructure that HOT uses for cleanup/pruning tuples from the
heap. So the risk of having a bug which can eat your data from the heap is
very low. Sure, it might mess up with indexes, return duplicate keys, not
return a row when it should have. Not saying they are not bad bugs, but
probably much less severe than someone removing live rows from the heap.

And we can make it a table level property, keep it off by default, turn it
off on system tables in this release and change the defaults only when we
get more confidence assuming people use it by explicitly turning it on. Now
may be that's not the right approach and keeping it off by default will
mean it receives much less testing than we would like. So we can keep it on
in the beta cycle and then take a call. I went a good length to make it
work on system tables because during HOT development, Tom told me that it
better work for everything or it doesn't work at all. But with WARM it
works for system tables and I know no known bugs, but if we don't want to
risk system tables, we might want to turn it off (just prior to release may
be).

Thanks,
Pavan

--
Pavan Deolasee http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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