SnapshotNow scans have the undesirable property that, in the face of
concurrent updates, the scan can fail to see either the old or the new
versions of the row. In many cases, we work around this by requiring
DDL operations to hold AccessExclusiveLock on the object being
modified; in some cases, the existing locking is inadequate and random
failures occur as a result. This commit doesn't change anything
related to locking, but will hopefully pave the way to allowing lock
strength reductions in the future.
The major issue has held us back from making this change in the past
is that taking an MVCC snapshot is significantly more expensive than
using a static special snapshot such as SnapshotNow. However, testing
of various worst-case scenarios reveals that this problem is not
severe except under fairly extreme workloads. To mitigate those
problems, we avoid retaking the MVCC snapshot for each new scan;
instead, we take a new snapshot only when invalidation messages have
been processed. The catcache machinery already requires that
invalidation messages be sent before releasing the related heavyweight
lock; else other backends might rely on locally-cached data rather
than scanning the catalog at all. Thus, making snapshot reuse
dependent on the same guarantees shouldn't break anything that wasn't
already subtly broken.
Patch by me. Review by Michael Paquier and Andres Freund.
... and have sepgsql use it to determine whether to check permissions
during certain operations. Indexes that are being created as a result
of REINDEX, for instance, do not need to have their permissions checked;
they were already checked when the index was created.
Author: KaiGai Kohei, slightly revised by me
This allows loadable modules to get control at drop time, perhaps for the
purpose of performing additional security checks or to log the event.
The initial purpose of this code is to support sepgsql, but other
applications should be possible as well.
KaiGai Kohei, reviewed by me.
After a SQL object is created, we provide an opportunity for security
or logging plugins to get control; for example, a security label provider
could use this to assign an initial security label to newly created
objects. The basic infrastructure is (hopefully) reusable for other types
of events that might require similar treatment.
KaiGai Kohei, with minor adjustments.
