pgsql: Count individual SQL commands in pg_restore's --transaction-size

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: pgsql-committers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: pgsql: Count individual SQL commands in pg_restore's --transaction-size
Date: 2024-07-29 16:17:34
Message-ID: E1sYT42-001lYb-BU@gemulon.postgresql.org
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Count individual SQL commands in pg_restore's --transaction-size mode.

The initial implementation in commit 959b38d77 counted one action
per TOC entry (except for some special cases for multi-blob BLOBS
entries). This assumes that TOC entries are all about equally
complex, but it turns out that that assumption doesn't hold up very
well in binary-upgrade mode. For example, even after the previous
commit I was able to cause backend bloat with tables having many
inherited constraints. There may be other cases too. (Since no
serious problems have been reported with --single-transaction mode,
we can conclude that the backend copes well with psql's regular
restore scripts; but before 959b38d77 we never ran binary-upgrade
restores with multi-command transactions.)

To fix, count multi-command TOC entries as N actions, allowing the
transaction size to be scaled down when we hit a complex TOC entry.
Rather than add a SQL parser to pg_restore, approximate "multi
command" by counting semicolons in the TOC entry's defn string.
This will be fooled by semicolons appearing in string literals ---
but the error is in the conservative direction, so it doesn't seem
worth working harder. The biggest risk is with function/procedure
TOC entries, but we can just explicitly skip those.

(This is undoubtedly a hack, and maybe someday we'll be able to
revert it after fixing the backend's bloat issues or rethinking
what pg_dump emits in binary upgrade mode. But that surely isn't
a project for v17.)

Thanks to Alexander Korotkov for the let's-count-semicolons idea.

Per report from Justin Pryzby. Back-patch to v17 where txn_size mode
was introduced.

Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ZqEND4ZcTDBmcv31@pryzbyj2023

Branch
------
master

Details
-------
https://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/0f129052150487afab9fe64889c5bf7534f7bbc3

Modified Files
--------------
src/bin/pg_dump/pg_backup_archiver.c | 28 +++++++++++++++++++++++++---
1 file changed, 25 insertions(+), 3 deletions(-)

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