Re: A design for amcheck heapam verification

On Thu, Oct 5, 2017 at 7:00 PM, Peter Geoghegan <pg@bowt.ie> wrote:
> v3 of the patch series, attached, does it that way -- it adds a
> bloom_create(). The new bloom_create() function still allocates its
> own memory, but does so while using a FLEXIBLE_ARRAY_MEMBER. A
> separate bloom_init() function (that works with dynamic shared memory)
> could easily be added later, for the benefit of parallel hash join.

Since Peter E's work on making the documentation sgml files more
XML-like has broken the v3 patch doc build, attached is v4, which
fixes this bit rot. It also has a few small tweaks here and there to
the docs. Nothing worth noting specifically, really -- I just don't
like to leave my patches with bit rot for long. (Hat-tip to Thomas
Munro for making this easy to detect with his new CF continuous
integration tooling.)

I should point out that I shipped virtually the same code yesterday,
as v1.1 of the Github version of amcheck (also known as amcheck_next).
Early adopters will be able to use this new "heapallindexed"
functionality in the next few days, once packages become available for
the apt and yum community repos. Just as before, the Github version
will work on versions of Postgres >= 9.4.

This seems like good timing on my part, because we know that this new
"heapallindexed" verification will detect the "freeze the dead" bugs
that the next point release is set to have fixes for -- that is
actually kind of how one of the bugs was found [1]. We may even want
to advertise the available of this check within amcheck_next, in the
release notes for the next Postgres point release.

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAH2-Wznm4rCrhFAiwKPWTpEw2bXDtgROZK7jWWGucXeH3D1fmA@mail.gmail.com
-- 
Peter Geoghegan