as per recent discussions.  Invent SubTransactionIds that are managed like
CommandIds (ie, counter is reset at start of each top transaction), and
use these instead of TransactionIds to keep track of subtransaction status
in those modules that need it.  This means that a subtransaction does not
need an XID unless it actually inserts/modifies rows in the database.
Accordingly, don't assign it an XID nor take a lock on the XID until it
tries to do that.  This saves a lot of overhead for subtransactions that
are only used for error recovery (eg plpgsql exceptions).  Also, arrange
to release a subtransaction's XID lock as soon as the subtransaction
exits, in both the commit and abort cases.  This avoids holding many
unique locks after a long series of subtransactions.  The price is some
additional overhead in XactLockTableWait, but that seems acceptable.
Finally, restructure the state machine in xact.c to have a more orthogonal
set of states for subtransactions.

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.

errors in internally-generated queries, such as those submitted by
plpgsql functions.  Per recent discussions with Fabien Coelho.

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

Both plannable queries and utility commands are now always executed
within Portals, which have been revamped so that they can handle the
load (they used to be good only for single SELECT queries).  Restructure
code to push command-completion-tag selection logic out of postgres.c,
so that it won't have to be duplicated between simple and extended queries.
initdb forced due to addition of a field to Query nodes.

command status at the interactive level.  SPI_processed, etc are set
in the same way as the returned command status would have been set if
the same querystring were issued interactively.  Per gripe from
Michael Paesold 25-Sep-02.

in snapshots, per my proposal of a few days ago.  Also, tweak heapam.c
routines (heap_insert, heap_update, heap_delete, heap_mark4update) to
be passed the command ID to use, instead of doing GetCurrentCommandID.
For catalog updates they'll still get passed current command ID, but
for updates generated from the main executor they'll get passed the
command ID saved in the snapshot the query is using.  This should fix
some corner cases associated with functions and triggers that advance
current command ID while an outer query is still in progress.

initdb/regression tests pass.

spacing.  Also adds space for one-line comments.

tests pass.

- New functions to create a portal using a prepared/saved
  SPI plan or lookup an existing portal by name.
- Functions to fetch/move from/in portals. Results are placed
  in the usual SPI_processed and SPI_tuptable, so the entire
  set of utility functions can be used to gain attribute access.
- Prepared/saved SPI plans now use their own memory context
  and SPI_freeplan(plan) can remove them.
- Tuple result sets (SPI_tuptable) now uses it's own memory
  context and can be free'd by SPI_freetuptable(tuptab).

Enhancement of PL/pgSQL

- Uses generic named portals internally in FOR ... SELECT
  loops to avoid running out of memory on huge result sets.
- Support for CURSOR and REFCURSOR syntax using the new SPI
  functionality. Cursors used internally only need no explicit
  transaction block. Refcursor variables can be used inside
  of explicit transaction block to pass cursors between main
  application and functions.


Jan

for details).  It doesn't really do that much yet, since there are no
short-term memory contexts in the executor, but the infrastructure is
in place and long-term contexts are handled reasonably.  A few long-
standing bugs have been fixed, such as 'VACUUM; anything' in a single
query string crashing.  Also, out-of-memory is now considered a
recoverable ERROR, not FATAL.
Eliminate a large amount of crufty, now-dead code in and around
memory management.
Fix problem with holding off SIGTRAP, SIGSEGV, etc in postmaster and
backend startup.

lists are now plain old garden-variety Lists, allocated with palloc,
rather than specialized expansible-array data allocated with malloc.
This substantially simplifies their handling and eliminates several
sources of memory leakage.
Several basic types of erroneous queries (syntax error, attempt to
insert a duplicate key into a unique index) now demonstrably leak
zero bytes per query.

instead of SPI_execp() for simple expressions.

Jan