Starting a new thread about this to get more visibility.
Despite the extensive work that has been done on hash indexes this
release, we have thus far not made any change to the on-disk format
that is not nominally backward-compatible. Commit
293e24e507838733aba4748b514536af2d39d7f2 did make a change for new
hash indexes, but included backward-compatibility code so that old
indexes would continue to work. However, I'd like to also commit
Mithun Cy's patch to expand hash indexes more gradually -- latest
version in http://postgr.es/m/CAD__OujD-iBxm91ZcqziaYftWqJxnFqgMv361V9zke83s6ifBg@mail.gmail.com
-- and that's not backward-compatible.
It would be possible to write code to convert the old metapage format
to the new metapage format introduced by that patch, and it wouldn't
be very hard, but I think it would be better to NOT do that, and
instead force everybody upgrading to v10 to rebuild all of their hash
indexes. If we don't do that, then we'll never know whether
instances of hash index corruption reported against v10 or higher are
caused by defects in the new code, because there's always the chance
that the hash index could have been built on a pre-v10 version, got
corrupted because of the lack of WAL-logging, and then been brought up
to v10+ via pg_upgrade. Forcing a reindex in v10 kills three birds
with one stone:
- No old, not logged, possibly corrupt hash indexes floating around
after an upgrade to v10.
- Can remove the backward-compatibility code added by
293e24e507838733aba4748b514536af2d39d7f2 instead of keeping it around
forever.
- No need to worry about doing an in-place upgrade of the metapage for
the above-mentioned patch.
Thoughts?
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
