• Tom Lane's avatar
    Fix assorted bugs in CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY. · 3c840464
    Tom Lane authored
    Commit 8cb53654, which introduced DROP
    INDEX CONCURRENTLY, managed to break CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY via a poor
    choice of catalog state representation.  The pg_index state for an index
    that's reached the final pre-drop stage was the same as the state for an
    index just created by CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY.  This meant that the
    (necessary) change to make RelationGetIndexList ignore about-to-die indexes
    also made it ignore freshly-created indexes; which is catastrophic because
    the latter do need to be considered in HOT-safety decisions.  Failure to
    do so leads to incorrect index entries and subsequently wrong results from
    queries depending on the concurrently-created index.
    
    To fix, add an additional boolean column "indislive" to pg_index, so that
    the freshly-created and about-to-die states can be distinguished.  (This
    change obviously is only possible in HEAD.  This patch will need to be
    back-patched, but in 9.2 we'll use a kluge consisting of overloading the
    formerly-impossible state of indisvalid = true and indisready = false.)
    
    In addition, change CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY so that the pg_index
    flag changes they make without exclusive lock on the index are made via
    heap_inplace_update() rather than a normal transactional update.  The
    latter is not very safe because moving the pg_index tuple could result in
    concurrent SnapshotNow scans finding it twice or not at all, thus possibly
    resulting in index corruption.  This is a pre-existing bug in CREATE INDEX
    CONCURRENTLY, which was copied into the DROP code.
    
    In addition, fix various places in the code that ought to check to make
    sure that the indexes they are manipulating are valid and/or ready as
    appropriate.  These represent bugs that have existed since 8.2, since
    a failed CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY could leave a corrupt or invalid
    index behind, and we ought not try to do anything that might fail with
    such an index.
    
    Also fix RelationReloadIndexInfo to ensure it copies all the pg_index
    columns that are allowed to change after initial creation.  Previously we
    could have been left with stale values of some fields in an index relcache
    entry.  It's not clear whether this actually had any user-visible
    consequences, but it's at least a bug waiting to happen.
    
    In addition, do some code and docs review for DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY;
    some cosmetic code cleanup but mostly addition and revision of comments.
    
    This will need to be back-patched, but in a noticeably different form,
    so I'm committing it to HEAD before working on the back-patch.
    
    Problem reported by Amit Kapila, diagnosis by Pavan Deolassee,
    fix by Tom Lane and Andres Freund.
    3c840464
dependency.c 86.8 KB