Re: Disabling Heap-Only Tuples

On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 at 13:18, Tomas Vondra <tomas(dot)vondra(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> On 7/7/23 11:55, Matthias van de Meent wrote:
> > On Fri, 7 Jul 2023 at 06:53, Dilip Kumar <dilipbalaut(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Fri, Jul 7, 2023 at 1:48 AM Matthias van de Meent
> >> <boekewurm+postgres(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, 5 Jul 2023 at 19:55, Thom Brown <thom(at)linux(dot)com> wrote:
> >>>>
> >>>> On Wed, 5 Jul 2023 at 18:05, Matthias van de Meent
> >>>> <boekewurm+postgres(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> >>>>> So what were you thinking of? A session GUC? A table option?
> >>>>
> >>>> Both.
> >>>
> >>> Here's a small patch implementing a new table option max_local_update
> >>> (name very much bikesheddable). Value is -1 (default, disabled) or the
> >>> size of the table in MiB that you still want to allow to update on the
> >>> same page. I didn't yet go for a GUC as I think that has too little
> >>> control on the impact on the system.
> >>
> >> So IIUC, this parameter we can control that instead of putting the new
> >> version of the tuple on the same page, it should choose using
> >> RelationGetBufferForTuple(), and that can reduce the fragmentation
> >> because now if there is space then most of the updated tuple will be
> >> inserted in same pages. But this still can not truncate the pages
> >> from the heap right? because we can not guarantee that the new page
> >> selected by RelationGetBufferForTuple() is not from the end of the
> >> heap, and until we free the pages from the end of the heap, the vacuum
> >> can not truncate any page. Is my understanding correct?
> >
> > Yes. If you don't have pages with (enough) free space for the updated
> > tuples in your table, or if the FSM doesn't accurately reflect the
> > actual state of free space in your table, this won't help (which is
> > also the reason why I run vacuum in the tests). It also won't help if
> > you don't update the tuples physically located at the end of your
> > table, but in the targeted workload this would introduce a bias where
> > new tuple versions are moved to the front of the table.
> >
> > Something to note is that this may result in very bad bloat when this
> > is combined with a low fillfactor: All blocks past max_local_update
> > will be unable to use space reserved by fillfactor because FSM lookups
> > always take fillfactor into account, and all updates (which ignore
> > fillfactor when local) would go through the FSM instead, thus reducing
> > the space available on each block to exactly the fillfactor. So, this
> > might need some extra code to make sure we don't accidentally blow up
> > the table's size with UPDATEs when max_local_update is combined with
> > low fillfactors. I'm not sure where that would fit best.
> >
>
> I know the thread started as "let's disable HOT" and this essentially
> just proposes to do that using a table option. But I wonder if that's
> far too simple to be reliable, because hoping RelationGetBufferForTuple
> happens to do the right thing does not seem great.
>
> I wonder if we should invent some definition of "strategy" that would
> tell RelationGetBufferForTuple what it should aim for ...
>
> I'm imagining either a table option with a couple possible values
> (default, non-hot, first-page, ...) or maybe something even more
> elaborate (perhaps even a callback?).
>
> Now, it's not my intention to hijack this thread, but this discussion
> reminds me one of the ideas from my "BRIN improvements" talk, about
> maybe using BRIN indexes for routing. UPDATEs may be a major issue for
> BRIN, making them gradually worse over time. If we could "tell"
> RelationGetBufferForTuple() which buffers are more suitable (by looking
> at an index, histogram or some approximate mapping), that might help.

Just as another point in support of strategy based/extensible tuple
placement, I would at some point try out placing INSERT ON CONFLICT
tuples on the same page as the preceding key in the index. Use case is
in tables with (series, timestamp) primary key to get locality of
access range scanning for a single series. Placement will always be a
tradeoff that is dependent on hardware and workload, and the effect
can be pretty large. For the mentioned use case, if placement can
maintain some semblance of clustering, there will be a 10-100x
reduction in buffers accessed for a relatively minor increase in
bloat.

--
Ants Aasma
Senior Database Engineer
www.cybertec-postgresql.com