Re: Re: new patch of MERGE (merge_204) & a question about duplicated ctid - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

From Greg Smith
Subject Re: Re: new patch of MERGE (merge_204) & a question about duplicated ctid
Date
Msg-id 4D35DA1E.4050506@2ndquadrant.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Re: new patch of MERGE (merge_204) & a question about duplicated ctid  (David Fetter <david@fetter.org>)
List pgsql-hackers
David Fetter wrote:
> I think I haven't communicated clearly what I'm suggesting, which is
> that we ship with both an UPSERT and a MERGE, the former being ugly,
> crude and simple, and the latter festooned with dire warnings about
> isolation levels and locking.
>   

I don't know that I completely agree with the idea that the UPSERT 
version should always be crude and the MERGE one necessarily heavy from 
a performance perspective.  However, I do feel you raise a legitimate 
point that once the hard stuff is done, and the locking issues around 
SQL proper MERGE sorted, having an UPSERT/REPLACE synonym that maps to 
it under the hood may be a useful way to provide a better user 
experience.  The way I see this, the right goal is to first provide the 
full spec behavior with good performance, and get all that plumbing 
right.  There's nothing that says we can't provide an easier syntax than 
the admittedly complicated MERGE one to the users though.  (I am tempted 
to make a joke about how you could probaby

So, as for this patch...there's about half a dozen significant open 
issues with the current code, along with a smattering of smaller ones.  
The problems remaining are deep enough that I think it would be 
challenging to work through them for this CF under the best conditions.  
And given that we haven't heard from Boxuan since early December, we're 
definitely understaffed to tackle major revisions.

My hope was that we'd get an updated patch from him before the CF 
deadline.  Even without it, maybe get some more internal help here.  
Given my focus on checkpoint issues, Simon on Sync Rep, and Dimitri 
still on his Extensions push, that's second part isn't going to happen.

I am marking MERGE officially "Returned With Feedback" for 9.1.  Lots of 
progress made, much better community understanding of the unresolved 
issues now than when we started, but not in shape to go into this 
release.  Since we still have some significant interest here in getting 
this finished, I'll see if I can get put together a better game-plan for 
how to get this actually done for 9.2 in time to discuss at release 
planning time.  The main thing that's become much more obvious to me 
just recently is how the remaining issues left here relate to the true 
serialization work, so worrying about that first is probably the right 
order anyway.

-- 
Greg Smith   2ndQuadrant US    greg@2ndQuadrant.com   Baltimore, MD
PostgreSQL Training, Services, and 24x7 Support  www.2ndQuadrant.us




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