Re: SKIP LOCKED DATA

On Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 5:38 AM, Thomas Munro <munro(at)ip9(dot)org> wrote:
> On 16 January 2012 21:30, Josh Berkus <josh(at)agliodbs(dot)com> wrote:
>
>> Useful, yes.  Harder than it looks, probably.  I tried to mock up a
>> version of this years ago for a project where I needed it, and ran into
>> all kinds of race conditions.
>
> Can you remember any details about those race conditions?
>
>> Anyway, if it could be made to work, this is extremely useful for any
>> application which needs queueing behavior (with is a large plurality, if
>> not a majority, of applications).
>
> Ok, based on this feedback I decided to push further and try
> implementating this.  See POC/WIP patch attached.  It seems to work
> for simple examples but I haven't yet tried to break it or see how it
> interacts with more complicated queries or high concurrency levels.
> It probably contains at least a few rookie mistakes!  Any feedback
> gratefully received.
>
> The approach is described in my original email.  Short version:
> heap_lock_tuple now takes an enum called wait_policy instead of a
> boolean called nowait, with the following values:
>
>  LockWaitBlock: wait for lock (like nowait = false before),
>
>  LockWaitError: error if not immediately lockable (like nowait = true
>                 before)
>
>  LockWaitSkip:  give up and return HeapTupleWouldBlock if not
>                 immediately lockable (this is a new policy)
>
> The rest of the patch is about getting the appropriate value down to
> that function call, following the example of the existing nowait
> support, and skipping rows if you said SKIP LOCKED DATA and you got
> HeapTupleWouldBlock.
>
> Compared to one very popular commercial database's implementation, I
> think this is a little bit friendlier for the user who wants to
> distribute work.  Let's say you want to lock one row without lock
> contention, which this patch allows with FETCH FIRST 1 ROW ONLY FOR
> UPDATE SKIP LOCKED DATA in an SQL query.  In that other system, the
> mechanism for limiting the number of rows fetched is done in the WHERE
> clause, and therefore the N rows are counted *before* checking if the
> lock can be obtained, so users sometimes have to resort to stored
> procedures so they can control the FETCH from a cursor imperatively.
> In another popular commercial database from Redmond, you can ask for
> the top (first) N rows while using the equivalent of SKIP LOCKED DATA
> and it has the same effect as this patch as far as I can tell, and
> another large blue system is the same.
>
> As discussed in another branch of this thread, you can probably get
> the same effect with transactional advisory locks.  But I personally
> like row skipping better as an explicit feature because:
>
> (1) I think there might be an order-of-evaluation problem with a WHERE
> clause containing both lock testing and row filtering expressions (ie
> it is undefined right?) which you might need subselects to work around
> (ie to be sure to avoid false positive locks, not sure about this).
>
> (2) The advisory technique requires you to introduce an integer
> identifier if you didn't already have one and then lock that despite
> having already said which rows you want to try to lock in standard row
> filtering expressions.
>
> (3) The advisory technique requires all users of the table to
> participate in the advisory lock protocol even if they don't want to
> use the option to skip lock.
>
> (4) It complements NOWAIT (which could also have been done with
> transactional advisory locks, with a function like try_lock_or_fail).
>
> (5) I like the idea of directly porting applications from other
> databases with this feature (that is what led me here).

Yeah -- also your stuff is also going to have much better interactions
with LIMIT. Your enhancements will beat an advisory lock
implementation all day long. the real competition is not advisory
locks, but the mvcc tricks played with PGQ. It's all about
implementing producer consumer queues (arguments that databases should
not do that are 100% bogus) and I can't help but wonder if that's a
better system.

merlin