Re: Fixes inconsistent behavior in vacuum when it processes multiple relations

On Fri, Jun 20, 2025 at 9:34 AM Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz> wrote:
>
> On Thu, Jun 19, 2025 at 03:30:26PM -0500, Nathan Bossart wrote:
> > After thinking about this some more, I'm wondering if it would be better to
> > pursue option (2) because it's a little less invasive (which is important
> > because this will need to be back-patched).  In any case, we have a similar
> > problem when recursing to the TOAST table, which can be fixed by copying
> > the params at the top of vacuum_rel().
> >
> > While testing out the attached patch, I noticed a couple of other
> > interesting problems in this area [0].
> >
> > [0] https://postgr.es/m/aFRxC1W_kZU9OjJ9%40nathan
>
> Hmm.  I like the simplicity of option 2) for the purpose the back
> branches and the post-feature-freeze v18.
>
> However, Option 1) would be my go-to option for HEAD (as of v19
> opening for business), but I think that we should harden the code more
> than suggested and treat all VacuumParams as purely input arguments
> rather keeping some pointers to it depending on the code path we are
> dealing with, so as no callers of these inner routines is surprised by
> changes that may happen internally.

I'd suggest just marking the VacuumParams *params with const, so
that the user can not change its content, or the compiler will error
out, it will force the user to make a copy if changes are needed.
I see vacuum_get_cutoffs already has the const signature.

Passing by const pointer is more efficient than passing by structure value.

> Hence, reading the code of v2,
> I'd suggest to apply the same rule to vacuum_get_cutoffs(),
> do_analyze_rel() and heap_vacuum_rel().  Except if I am missing
> something, it looks like all these calls should be OK with this new
> policy.  This implies also changing relation_vacuum() in tableam.h,
> which can be a HEAD-only change anyway.
> --
> Michael



--
Regards
Junwang Zhao