checkpoint.  This guards against an unlikely data-loss scenario in which
we re-use the relfilenode, then crash, then replay the deletion and
recreation of the file.  Even then we'd be OK if all insertions into the
new relation had been WAL-logged ... but that's not guaranteed given all
the no-WAL-logging optimizations that have recently been added.

Patch by Heikki Linnakangas, per a discussion last month.

rows will normally never obtain an XID at all.  We already did things this way
for subtransactions, but this patch extends the concept to top-level
transactions.  In applications where there are lots of short read-only
transactions, this should improve performance noticeably; not so much from
removal of the actual XID-assignments, as from reduction of overhead that's
driven by the rate of XID consumption.  We add a concept of a "virtual
transaction ID" so that active transactions can be uniquely identified even
if they don't have a regular XID.  This is a much lighter-weight concept:
uniqueness of VXIDs is only guaranteed over the short term, and no on-disk
record is made about them.

Florian Pflug, with some editorialization by Tom.

pending fsyncs during DROP DATABASE.  Obviously necessary in hindsight :-(

back-stamped for this.

having md.c return a success/failure boolean to smgr.c, which was just going
to elog anyway, let md.c issue the elog messages itself.  This allows better
error reporting, particularly in cases such as "short read" or "short write"
which Peter was complaining of.  Also, remove the kluge of allowing mdread()
to return zeroes from a read-beyond-EOF: this is now an error condition
except when InRecovery or zero_damaged_pages = true.  (Hash indexes used to
require that behavior, but no more.)  Also, enforce that mdwrite() is to be
used for rewriting existing blocks while mdextend() is to be used for
extending the relation EOF.  This restriction lets us get rid of the old
ad-hoc defense against creating huge files by an accidental reference to
a bogus block number: we'll only create new segments in mdextend() not
mdwrite() or mdread().  (Again, when InRecovery we allow it anyway, since
we need to allow updates of blocks that were later truncated away.)
Also, clean up the original makeshift patch for bug #2737: move the
responsibility for padding relation segments to full length into md.c.

when an error occurs during xlog replay.  Also, replace the former risky
'write into a fixed-size buffer with no overflow detection' API for XLOG
record description routines; use an expansible StringInfo instead.  (The
latter accounts for most of the patch bulk.)

Qingqing Zhou

hacking by Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.

That code is never going to be used in the foreseeable future, and
where it's more than a stub it's making the redo routines harder to
read.

is the minimum required fix.  I want to look next at taking advantage of
it by simplifying the message semantics in the shared inval message queue,
but that part can be held over for 8.1 if it turns out too ugly.

Tag appropriate files for rc3

Also performed an initial run through of upgrading our Copyright date to
extend to 2005 ... first run here was very simple ... change everything
where: grep 1996-2004 && the word 'Copyright' ... scanned through the
generated list with 'less' first, and after, to make sure that I only
picked up the right entries ...

keep track of portal-related resources separately from transaction-related
resources.  This allows cursors to work in a somewhat sane fashion with
nested transactions.  For now, cursor behavior is non-subtransactional,
that is a cursor's state does not roll back if you abort a subtransaction
that fetched from the cursor.  We might want to change that later.

performance front, but with feature freeze upon us I think it's time to
drive a stake in the ground and say that this will be in 7.5.

Alvaro Herrera, with some help from Tom Lane.

locking conflict against concurrent CHECKPOINT that was discussed a few
weeks ago.  Also, if not using WAL archiving (which is always true ATM
but won't be if PITR makes it into this release), there's no need to
WAL-log the index build process; it's sufficient to force-fsync the
completed index before commit.  This seems to gain about a factor of 2
in my tests, which is consistent with writing half as much data.  I did
not try it with WAL on a separate drive though --- probably the gain would
be a lot less in that scenario.

temp tables, and avoid WAL-logging truncations of temp tables.  Do issue
fsync on truncated files (not sure this is necessary but it seems like
a good idea).

explicitly fsync'ing every (non-temp) file we have written since the
last checkpoint.  In the vast majority of cases, the burden of the
fsyncs should fall on the bgwriter process not on backends.  (To this
end, we assume that an fsync issued by the bgwriter will force out
blocks written to the same file by other processes using other file
descriptors.  Anyone have a problem with that?)  This makes the world
safe for WIN32, which ain't even got sync(2), and really makes the world
safe for Unixen as well, because sync(2) never had the semantics we need:
it offers no way to wait for the requested I/O to finish.

Along the way, fix a bug I recently introduced in xlog recovery:
file truncation replay failed to clear bufmgr buffers for the dropped
blocks, which could result in 'PANIC:  heap_delete_redo: no block'
later on in xlog replay.

wit: Add a header record to each WAL segment file so that it can be reliably
identified.  Avoid splitting WAL records across segment files (this is not
strictly necessary, but makes it simpler to incorporate the header records).
Make WAL entries for file creation, deletion, and truncation (as foreseen but
never implemented by Vadim).  Also, add support for making XLOG_SEG_SIZE
configurable at compile time, similarly to BLCKSZ.  Fix a couple bugs I
introduced in WAL replay during recent smgr API changes.  initdb is forced
due to changes in pg_control contents.

the relcache, and so the notion of 'blind write' is gone.  This should
improve efficiency in bgwriter and background checkpoint processes.
Internal restructuring in md.c to remove the not-very-useful array of
MdfdVec objects --- might as well just use pointers.
Also remove the long-dead 'persistent main memory' storage manager (mm.c),
since it seems quite unlikely to ever get resurrected.

make sure the $Id tags are converted to $PostgreSQL as well ...

Remove the 'strategy map' code, which was a large amount of mechanism
that no longer had any use except reverse-mapping from procedure OID to
strategy number.  Passing the strategy number to the index AM in the
first place is simpler and faster.
This is a preliminary step in planned support for cross-datatype index
operations.  I'm committing it now since the ScanKeyEntryInitialize()
API change touches quite a lot of files, and I want to commit those
changes before the tree drifts under me.

The local buffer manager is no longer used for newly-created relations
(unless they are TEMP); a new non-TEMP relation goes through the shared
bufmgr and thus will participate normally in checkpoints.  But TEMP relations
use the local buffer manager throughout their lifespan.  Also, operations
in TEMP relations are not logged in WAL, thus improving performance.
Since it's no longer necessary to fsync relations as they move out of the
local buffers into shared buffers, quite a lot of smgr.c/md.c/fd.c code
is no longer needed and has been removed: there's no concept of a dirty
relation anymore in md.c/fd.c, and we never fsync anything but WAL.
Still TODO: improve local buffer management algorithms so that it would
be reasonable to increase NLocBuffer.

initdb/regression tests pass.

spacing.  Also adds space for one-line comments.

tests pass.

existing lock manager and spinlocks: it understands exclusive vs shared
lock but has few other fancy features.  Replace most uses of spinlocks
with lightweight locks.  All remaining uses of spinlocks have very short
lock hold times (a few dozen instructions), so tweak spinlock backoff
code to work efficiently given this assumption.  All per my proposal on
pghackers 26-Sep-01.

do anything yet, but it has the necessary connections to initialization
and so forth.  Make some gestures towards allowing number of blocks in
a relation to be BlockNumber, ie, unsigned int, rather than signed int.
(I doubt I got all the places that are sloppy about it, yet.)  On the
way, replace the hardwired NLOCKS_PER_XACT fudge factor with a GUC
variable.

not being consulted anywhere, so remove it and remove the _mdnblocks()
calls that were used to set it.  Change smgrextend interface to pass in
the target block number (ie, current file length) --- the caller always
knows this already, having already done smgrnblocks(), so it's silly to
do it over again inside mdextend.  Net result: extension of a file now
takes one lseek(SEEK_END) and a write(), not three lseeks and a write.

(WAL logging for this is not done yet, however.)  Clean up a number of really
crufty things that are no longer needed now that DROP behaves nicely.  Make
temp table mapper do the right things when drop or rename affecting a temp
table is rolled back.  Also, remove "relation modified while in use" error
check, in favor of locking tables at first reference and holding that lock
throughout the statement.

relation OID is used as file node on creation but may be changed later
if required. Regression Tests Approved (c) -:)))

inputs have been converted to newstyle.  This should go a long way towards
fixing our portability problems with platforms where char and short
parameters are passed differently from int-width parameters.  Still
more to do for the Alpha port however.