Re: prevent immature WAL streaming

Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@oss.nttdata.com>

From: Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@oss.nttdata.com>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>, "Bossart, Nathan" <bossartn@amazon.com>, Kyotaro Horiguchi <horikyota.ntt@gmail.com>, 蔡梦娟(玊于) <mengjuan.cmj@alibaba-inc.com>, Jakub Wartak <Jakub.Wartak@tomtom.com>
Date: 2021-09-01T06:01:43Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

On 2021/09/01 12:15, Andres Freund wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> On 2021-09-01 11:34:34 +0900, Fujii Masao wrote:
>> On 2021/09/01 0:53, Andres Freund wrote:
>>> Of course, we need to be careful to not weaken WAL validity checking too
>>> much. How about the following:
>>>
>>> If we're "aborting" a continued record, we set XLP_FIRST_IS_ABORTED_PARTIAL on
>>> the page at which we do so (i.e. the page after the valid end of the WAL).
>>
>> When do you expect that XLP_FIRST_IS_ABORTED_PARTIAL is set? It's set
>> when recovery finds a a partially-flushed segment-spanning record?
>> But maybe we cannot do that (i.e., cannot overwrite the page) because
>> the page that the flag is set in might have already been archived. No?
> 
> I was imagining that XLP_FIRST_IS_ABORTED_PARTIAL would be set in the "tail
> end" of a partial record. I.e. if there's a partial record starting in the
> successfully archived segment A, but the end of the record, in B, has not been
> written to disk before a crash, we'd set XLP_FIRST_IS_ABORTED_PARTIAL at the
> end of the valid data in B. Which could not have been archived yet, or we'd
> not have a partial record.  So we should never need to set the flag on an
> already archived page.

Thanks for clarifying that! Unless I misunderstand that, when recovery ends
at a partially-flushed segment-spanning record, it sets
XLP_FIRST_IS_ABORTED_PARTIAL in the next segment before starting writing
new WAL data there. Therefore XLP_FIRST_IS_CONTRECORD or
XLP_FIRST_IS_ABORTED_PARTIAL must be set in the next segment following
a partially-flushed segment-spanning record. If none of them is set,
the validation code in recovery should report an error.

Yes, this design looks good to me.

Regards,

-- 
Fujii Masao
Advanced Computing Technology Center
Research and Development Headquarters
NTT DATA CORPORATION



Commits

  1. Fix determination of broken LSN in OVERWRITTEN_CONTRECORD

  2. Fix instability in 026_overwrite_contrecord.pl test.

  3. Fix typo

  4. Change recently added test code for stability

  5. Remove unstable, unnecessary test; fix typo

  6. Repair two portability oversights of new test

  7. Fix WAL replay in presence of an incomplete record

  8. Document XLOG_INCLUDE_XID a little better

  9. Revert "Avoid creating archive status ".ready" files too early"

  10. Avoid creating archive status ".ready" files too early

  11. Fix scenario where streaming standby gets stuck at a continuation record.

  12. Teach xlogreader to follow timeline switches

  13. Forbid using pg_xlogfile_name() and pg_xlogfile_name_offset() during