On Wed, Nov 23, 2016 at 8:37 AM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>>> The last checkpoint's oldestXid, and ShmemVariableCache's oldestXid,
>>> are already held down by ProcArray's catalog_xmin. But that doesn't
>>> mean we haven't removed newer tuples from specific relations and
>>> logged that in xl_heap_clean, etc, including catalogs or user
>>> catalogs, it only means the clog still exists for those XIDs.
>>
>> Really?
>
> (Note the double negative above).
>
> Yes, necessarily so. You can't look up xids older than the clog
> truncation threshold at oldestXid, per our discussion on txid_status()
> and traceable commit. But the tuples from that xact aren't guaranteed
> to exist in any given relation; vacuum uses vacuum_set_xid_limits(...)
> which calls GetOldestXmin(...); that in turn scans ProcArray to find
> the oldest xid any running xact cares about. It might bump it down
> further if there's a replication slot requirement or based on
> vacuum_defer_cleanup_age, but it doesn't care in the slightest about
> oldestXmin.
>
> oldestXmin cannot advance until vacuum has removed all tuples for that
> xid and advanced the database's datfrozenxid. But a given oldestXmin
> says nothing about which tuples, catalog or otherwise, still exist and
> are acessible.
Right. Sorry, my mistake.
--
Robert Haas
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