databases, per gripe from hubert depesz lubaczewski.  Patch from
Simon Riggs.

that examine fields that could change under them.  This is just to make
really sure that when we are fetching a value 'only once', that's what
actually happens.  Possibly this is a bug that should be back-patched,
but in the absence of solid evidence that it's needed, I won't bother.

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.

continue with the schedule.  Change current uses of SIGINT to abort a worker
into SIGTERM, which keeps the old behaviour of terminating the process.

Patch from ITAGAKI Takahiro, with some editorializing of my own.

which is the only state in which it's safe to initiate database queries.
It turns out that all but two of the callers thought that's what it meant;
and the other two were using it as a proxy for "will GetTopTransactionId()
return a nonzero XID"?  Since it was in fact an unreliable guide to that,
make those two just invoke GetTopTransactionId() always, then deal with a
zero result if they get one.

will exit before failing because of conflicting DB usage.  Per discussion,
this seems a good idea to help mask the fact that backend exit takes nonzero
time.  Remove a couple of thereby-obsoleted sleeps in contrib and PL
regression test sequences.

are in their commit critical sections via flags in the ProcArray.  Checkpoint
can watch the ProcArray to determine when it's safe to proceed.  This is
a considerably better solution to the original problem of race conditions
between checkpoint and transaction commit: it speeds up commit, since there's
one less lock to fool with, and it prevents the problem of checkpoint being
delayed indefinitely when there's a constant flow of commits.  Heikki, with
some kibitzing from Tom.

pointer" in every Snapshot struct.  This allows removal of the case-by-case
tests in HeapTupleSatisfiesVisibility, which should make it a bit faster
(I didn't try any performance tests though).  More importantly, we are no
longer violating portable C practices by assuming that small integers are
distinct from all pointer values, and HeapTupleSatisfiesDirty no longer
has a non-reentrant API involving side-effects on a global variable.

There were a couple of places calling HeapTupleSatisfiesXXX routines
directly rather than through the HeapTupleSatisfiesVisibility macro.
Since these places had to be changed anyway, I chose to make them go
through the macro for uniformity.

Along the way I renamed HeapTupleSatisfiesSnapshot to HeapTupleSatisfiesMVCC
to emphasize that it's only used with MVCC-type snapshots.  I was sorely
tempted to rename HeapTupleSatisfiesVisibility to HeapTupleSatisfiesSnapshot,
but forebore for the moment to avoid confusion and reduce the likelihood that
this patch breaks some of the pending patches.  Might want to reconsider
doing that later.

accessing it, like DROP DATABASE.  This allows the regression tests to pass
with autovacuum enabled, which open the gates for finally enabling autovacuum
by default.

back-stamped for this.

in PITR scenarios.  We now WAL-log the replacement of old XIDs with
FrozenTransactionId, so that such replacement is guaranteed to propagate to
PITR slave databases.  Also, rather than relying on hint-bit updates to be
preserved, pg_clog is not truncated until all instances of an XID are known to
have been replaced by FrozenTransactionId.  Add new GUC variables and
pg_autovacuum columns to allow management of the freezing policy, so that
users can trade off the size of pg_clog against the amount of freezing work
done.  Revise the already-existing code that forces autovacuum of tables
approaching the wraparound point to make it more bulletproof; also, revise the
autovacuum logic so that anti-wraparound vacuuming is done per-table rather
than per-database.  initdb forced because of changes in pg_class, pg_database,
and pg_autovacuum catalogs.  Heikki Linnakangas, Simon Riggs, and Tom Lane.

PGPROC array into snapshots, and use this information to avoid visits
to pg_subtrans in HeapTupleSatisfiesSnapshot.  This appears to solve
the pg_subtrans-related context swap storm problem that's been reported
by several people for 8.1.  While at it, modify GetSnapshotData to not
take an exclusive lock on ProcArrayLock, as closer analysis shows that
shared lock is always sufficient.
Itagaki Takahiro and Tom Lane

vacuums.  This allows a OLTP-like system with big tables to continue
regular vacuuming on small-but-frequently-updated tables while the
big tables are being vacuumed.

Original patch from Hannu Krossing, rewritten by Tom Lane and updated
by me.

Strip unused include files out unused include files, and add needed
includes to C files.

The next step is to remove unused include files in C files.

current commands; instead, store current-status information in shared
memory.  This substantially reduces the overhead of stats_command_string
and also ensures that pg_stat_activity is fully up to date at all times.
Per my recent proposal.

file.  The original code probed the PGPROC array separately for each PID,
which was not good for large numbers of backends: not only is the runtime
O(N^2) but most of it is spent holding ProcArrayLock.  Instead, take the
lock just once and copy the active PIDs into an array, then use qsort
and bsearch so that the lookup time is more like O(N log N).

reduce contention for the former single LockMgrLock.  Per my recent
proposal.  I set it up for 16 partitions, but on a pgbench test this
gives only a marginal further improvement over 4 partitions --- we need
to test more scenarios to choose the number of partitions.

comment line where output as too long, and update typedefs for /lib
directory.  Also fix case where identifiers were used as variable names
in the backend, but as typedefs in ecpg (favor the backend for
indenting).

Backpatch to 8.1.X.

to 'Size' (that is, size_t), and install overflow detection checks in it.
This allows us to remove the former arbitrary restrictions on NBuffers
etc.  It won't make any difference in a 32-bit machine, but in a 64-bit
machine you could theoretically have terabytes of shared buffers.
(How efficiently we could manage 'em remains to be seen.)  Similarly,
num_temp_buffers, work_mem, and maintenance_work_mem can be set above
2Gb on a 64-bit machine.  Original patch from Koichi Suzuki, additional
work by moi.

This patch also includes preliminary update of pg_dumpall for roles.
Petr Jelinek, with review by Bruce Momjian and Tom Lane.

hacking by Alvaro Herrera and Tom Lane.

communication structure, and make it its own module with its own lock.
This should reduce contention at least a little, and it definitely makes
the code seem cleaner.  Per my recent proposal.