Parallel worker error

Hello,

While investing an issue in Postgres-XL 10, I came across this rather
surprisingly behaviour in PG master. See this test case:

create role testuser1;
set role to testuser1;
show role; -- shows testuser1

-- reset back to default role
reset session authorization ;
show role; -- shows none

set force_parallel_mode TO 1;
select count(*) from pg_class ; -- ok

-- now drop the role and try parallel query again
drop role testuser1 ;
select count(*) from pg_class ; -- fails

The last statement in this test fails with an error:
ERROR: role "testuser1" does not exist
CONTEXT: parallel worker

Looks like the leader process when serialises the GUC state, saves the
"role" value, which is still set to testuser1 (and which is now dropped).
Later, when the parallel worker process tries to restore the GUC state, it
fails on catalog lookup.

Comments in show_role() mentions a kludge because apparently SET SESSION
AUTHORIZATION cannot call set_config_option and change the current value of
"role". So that probably explains why show_role() displays the correct
information, but parallel worker fails to handle the case.

It's quite possible that I don't understand the differences in "role" and
"session authorization", but it still looks like a bug to me. May
be SerializeGUCState() should check if SetRoleIsActive is true and only
then save the role information?

Thanks,
Pavan

--
Pavan Deolasee http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services