Fix race condition with toast table access from a stale syscache entry.
If a tuple in a syscache contains an out-of-line toasted field, and we
try to fetch that field shortly after some other transaction has committed
an update or deletion of the tuple, there is a race condition: vacuum
could come along and remove the toast tuples before we can fetch them.
This leads to transient failures like "missing chunk number 0 for toast
value NNNNN in pg_toast_2619", as seen in recent reports from Andrew
Hammond and Tim Uckun.
The design idea of syscache is that access to stale syscache entries
should be prevented by relation-level locks, but that fails for at least
two cases where toasted fields are possible: ANALYZE updates pg_statistic
rows without locking out sessions that might want to plan queries on the
same table, and CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION updates pg_proc rows without
any meaningful lock at all.
The least risky fix seems to be an idea that Heikki suggested when we
were dealing with a related problem back in August: forcibly detoast any
out-of-line fields before putting a tuple into syscache in the first place.
This avoids the problem because at the time we fetch the parent tuple from
the catalog, we should be holding an MVCC snapshot that will prevent
removal of the toast tuples, even if the parent tuple is outdated
immediately after we fetch it. (Note: I'm not convinced that this
statement holds true at every instant where we could be fetching a syscache
entry at all, but it does appear to hold true at the times where we could
fetch an entry that could have a toasted field. We will need to be a bit
wary of adding toast tables to low-level catalogs that don't have them
already.) An additional benefit is that subsequent uses of the syscache
entry should be faster, since they won't have to detoast the field.
Back-patch to all supported versions. The problem is significantly harder
to reproduce in pre-9.0 releases, because of their willingness to flush
every entry in a syscache whenever the underlying catalog is vacuumed
(cf CatalogCacheFlushRelation); but there is still a window for trouble.
Branch
------
REL8_3_STABLE
Details
-------
http://git.postgresql.org/pg/commitdiff/7e03d2849053a2c4f73ebe79d6b61297758105f2
Modified Files
--------------
src/backend/access/heap/tuptoaster.c | 81 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
src/backend/utils/cache/catcache.c | 19 ++++++++-
src/include/access/tuptoaster.h | 9 ++++
3 files changed, 108 insertions(+), 1 deletions(-)
