Re: [WIP] In-place upgrade

> You need to apply also two other patches:
> which are located here:
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CommitFestInProgress#Upgrade-in-place_and_related_issues
> I moved one related patch from another category here to correct place.

Just to confirm, which two?

> http://git.postgresql.org/?p=~davidfetter/upgrade_in_place/.git;a=snapshot;h=c72bafada59ed278ffac59657c913bc375f77808;sf=tgz
>
> It should contains every think including yesterdays improvements (delete,
> insert, update works - inser/update only on table without index).

Wow, sounds like great improvements. I understand your difficulties
in keeping up with HEAD, but I hope we can figure out some solution,
because right now I have a diff (that I can't apply) and a tarball
(that I can't diff) and that is not ideal for reviewing.

> Yeah, it is most difficult part :-) find correct names for it. I think that
> each version of structure should have version suffix including lastone. And
> of cource the last one we should have a general name without suffix - see
> example:
>
> typedef struct PageHeaderData_04 { ...} PageHeaderData_04
> typedef struct PageHeaderData_03 { ...} PageHeaderData_03
> typedef PageHeaderData_04 PageHeaderData
>
> This allows you exactly specify version on places where you need it and keep
> general name where version is not relevant.

That doesn't make sense to me. If PageHeaderData and
PageHeaderData_04 are the same type, how do you decide which one to
use in any particular place in the code?

> How suffix should looks it another question. I prefer to have 04 not only 4.
> What's about PageHeaderData_V04?

I prefer "V" as a delimiter rather than "_" because that makes it more
clear that the number which follows is a version number, but I think
"_V" is overkill. However, I don't really want to argue the point;
I'm just throwing in my $0.02 and I am sure others will have their own
views as well.

> By the way what YMMV means?

"Your Mileage May Vary."
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=YMMV

>> I am pretty skeptical of the idea that all of the HeapTuple* functions
>> can just be conditionalized on the page version and everything will
>> Just Work. It seems like that is too low a level to be worrying about
>> such things. Even if it happens to work for the changes between V3
>> and V4, what happens when V5 or V6 is changed in such a way that the
>> answer to HeapTupleIsWhatever is neither "Yes" nor "No", but rather
>> "Maybe" or "Seven"? The performance hit also sounds painful. I don't
>> have a better idea right now though...
>
> OK. Currently it works (or I hope that it works). If somebody in a future
> invent some special change, i think in most (maybe all) cases there will be
> possible mapping.
>
> The speed is key point. When I check it last time I go 1% performance drop
> in fresh database. I think 1% is good price for in-place online upgrade.

I think that's arguable and something that needs to be more broadly
discussed. I wouldn't be keen to pay a 1% performance drop for this
feature, because it's not a feature I really need. Sure, in-place
upgrade would be nice to have, but for me, dump and reload isn't a
huge problem. It's a lot better than the 5% number you quoted
previously, but I'm not sure whether it is good enough,

I would feel more comfortable if the feature could be completely
disabled via compile-time defines. Then you could build the system
either with or without in-place upgrade, according to your needs. But
I don't think that's very practical with HeapTuple* as functions. You
could conditionalize away the switch, but the function call overhead
would remain. To get rid of that, you'd need some enormous, fragile
hack that I don't even want to contemplate.

Really, what I'd ideally like to see here is a system where the V3
code is in essence error-recovery code. Everything should be V4-only
unless you detect a V3 page, and then you error out (if in-place
upgrade is not enabled) or jump to the appropriate V3-aware code (if
in-place upgrade is enabled). In theory, with a system like this, it
seems like the overhead for V4 ought to be no more than the cost of
checking the page version on each page read, which is a cheap sanity
check we'd be willing to pay for anyway, and trivial in cost.

But I think we probably need some input from -core on this topic as well.

...Robert