Avoid corrupting tables when ANALYZE inside a transaction is rolled back.
VACUUM and ANALYZE update the target table's pg_class row in-place, that is
nontransactionally. This is OK, more or less, for the statistical columns,
which are mostly nontransactional anyhow. It's not so OK for the DDL hint
flags (relhasindex etc), which might get changed in response to
transactional changes that could still be rolled back. This isn't a
problem for VACUUM, since it can't be run inside a transaction block nor
in parallel with DDL on the table. However, we allow ANALYZE inside a
transaction block, so if the transaction had earlier removed the last
index, rule, or trigger from the table, and then we roll back the
transaction after ANALYZE, the table would be left in a corrupted state
with the hint flags not set though they should be.
To fix, suppress the hint-flag updates if we are InTransactionBlock().
This is safe enough because it's always OK to postpone hint maintenance
some more; the worst-case consequence is a few extra searches of pg_index
et al. There was discussion of instead using a transactional update,
but that would change the behavior in ways that are not all desirable:
in most scenarios we're better off keeping ANALYZE's statistical values
even if the ANALYZE itself rolls back. In any case we probably don't want
to change this behavior in back branches.
Per bug #11638 from Casey Shobe. This has been broken for a good long
time, so back-patch to all supported branches.
Tom Lane and Michael Paquier, initial diagnosis by Andres Freund
Branch
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REL9_3_STABLE
Details
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http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/81f0a5e38a05811f762b1dec9d344be923025f40
Modified Files
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src/backend/commands/vacuum.c | 91 +++++++++++++++++------------
src/test/regress/expected/alter_table.out | 17 ++++++
src/test/regress/sql/alter_table.sql | 10 ++++
3 files changed, 81 insertions(+), 37 deletions(-)