Re: Large expressions in indexes can't be stored (non-TOASTable)

On Tue, Sep 24, 2024 at 01:21:45PM +0900, Michael Paquier wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 23, 2024 at 10:50:21AM -0500, Nathan Bossart wrote:
>> I carefully inspected all the code paths this patch touches, and I think
>> I've got all the details right, but I would be grateful if someone else
>> could take a look.
> 
> No objections from here with putting the snapshots pops and pushes
> outside the inner routines of reindex/drop concurrently, meaning that
> ReindexRelationConcurrently(), DefineIndex() and index_drop() are fine
> to do these operations.

Great.  I plan to push 0001 shortly.

> Actually, thinking more...  Could it be better to have some more
> sanity checks in the stack outside the toast code for catalogs with
> toast tables?  For example, I could imagine adding a check in
> CatalogTupleUpdate() so as all catalog accessed that have a toast 
> relation require an active snapshot.  That would make checks more
> aggressive, because we would not need any toast data in a catalog to
> make sure that there is a snapshot set.  This strikes me as something
> we could do better to improve the detection of failures like the one
> reported by Alexander when updating catalog tuples as this can be
> triggered each time we do a CatalogTupleUpdate() when dirtying a
> catalog tuple.  The idea is then to have something before the
> HaveRegisteredOrActiveSnapshot() in the toast internals, for catalogs,
> and we would not require toast data to detect problems.

I gave this a try and, unsurprisingly, found a bunch of other problems.  I
hastily hacked together the attached patch that should fix all of them, but
I'd still like to comb through the code a bit more.  The three catalogs
with problems are pg_replication_origin, pg_subscription, and
pg_constraint.  pg_contraint has had a TOAST table for a while, and I don't
think it's unheard of for conbin to be large, so this one is probably worth
fixing.  pg_subscription hasn't had its TOAST table for quite as long, but
presumably subpublications could be large enough to require out-of-line
storage.  pg_replication_origin, however, only has one varlena column:
roname.  Three out of the seven problem areas involve
pg_replication_origin, but AFAICT that'd only ever be a problem if the name
of your replication origin requires out-of-line storage.  So... maybe we
should just remove pg_replication_origin's TOAST table instead...

-- 
nathan