Re: INSERT ... ON CONFLICT IGNORE (and UPDATE) 3.0

On Tue, Mar 31, 2015 at 2:26 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg(at)heroku(dot)com> wrote:
> Andres' wish to do things that way is at least partially motivated by
> having logical decoding just work.

I should add that there appears to be some need to terminate the loop
of speculative token waiting. By that I mean that since we're not
looking at the proc array to get a speculative token from
HeapTupleSatisfiesDirty() now, there is a livelock hazard. That goes
away when the speculative inserter cleans up after itself, as Andres
proposed. It would also go away if any speculative waiter cleaned up
after the inserter, which you suggested (that would be kind of
invasive to places like _bt_doinsert(), though). Finally, it would
also work if HeapTupleSatisfiesDirty() tested if the token was still
held directly, before reporting a speculative token, by for example
attempting to briefly acquire a ShareLock on the token (but that would
mean that the extra lock acquisition would be required unless and
until someone updated that originally-speculative tuple, in doing so
finally changing its t_ctid).

I think that we definitely have to do something like this, in any
case. Maybe just have SpeculativeTokenWait deal with the clean up is
cleanest, if we're not going to have inserters clean-up after
themselves immediately per Andres' suggestion.
--
Peter Geoghegan