Excerpts from Bruce Momjian's message of mar mar 13 14:00:52 -0300 2012:
>
> On Tue, Mar 06, 2012 at 04:39:32PM -0300, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> > When there is a single locker in a tuple, we can just store the locking info
> > in the tuple itself. We do this by storing the locker's Xid in XMAX, and
> > setting hint bits specifying the locking strength. There is one exception
> > here: since hint bit space is limited, we do not provide a separate hint bit
> > for SELECT FOR SHARE, so we have to use the extended info in a MultiXact in
> > that case. (The other cases, SELECT FOR UPDATE and SELECT FOR KEY SHARE, are
> > presumably more commonly used due to being the standards-mandated locking
> > mechanism, or heavily used by the RI code, so we want to provide fast paths
> > for those.)
>
> Are those tuple bits actually "hint" bits? They seem quite a bit more
> powerful than a "hint".
I'm not sure what's your point. We've had a "hint" bit for SELECT FOR
UPDATE for ages. Even 8.2 had HEAP_XMAX_EXCL_LOCK and
HEAP_XMAX_SHARED_LOCK. Maybe they are misnamed and aren't really
"hints", but it's not the job of this patch to fix that problem.
--
Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
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