Re: BRIN autosummarization lacking a snapshot

Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>

From: Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>
To: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
Cc: Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-11-04T11:47:47Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →
  1. Fix snapshot handling bug in recent BRIN fix

  2. BRIN autosummarization may need a snapshot

Attachments

On 2025-Nov-04, Michael Paquier wrote:

> Spawning an autovacuum worker can feel artistic as we try to make the
> tests run fast, but it's not that bad.  The trick is to use an
> "autovacuum_naptime = 1".  Then you could either scan the server logs
> for some 'autovacuum: processing database "blah"', or just a polling
> query based on pg_stat_all_tables.autovacuum_count.  See for example
> 006_signal_autovacuum.pl.

Ah yes ... and, actually, we already have a file doing a closely related
thing, so I added to it.  Here's the patch for master.  Backbranches are
essentially identical, modulo these changes for 13 and 14:

-use Test::More tests => 2;
+use Test::More tests => 4;

I'm glad we got rid of that :-)


With my initial try of this test, just counting the number of BRIN
tuples, I was _really_ surprised that the index did indeed contain the
expected number of tuples, even when the error was being thrown.  This
turned out to be expected, because the way BRIN summarization works is
that we insert a placeholder tuple first, then update it to the correct
value, and the error only aborts the second part.  That's why I needed
to add a WHERE clause to only count non-placeholder tuples.

I also added a 'sleep(1)', to avoid looping on the query when we know
autovacuum can't possibly have had a chance to run yet.

I unleashed CI on branches 15 and master, and will push soon if they
both turn green.

-- 
Álvaro Herrera               48°01'N 7°57'E  —  https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"La virtud es el justo medio entre dos defectos" (Aristóteles)