Re: crash-safe visibility map, take three

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:
> On 30.11.2010 18:33, Tom Lane wrote:
> > Robert Haas<robertmhaas@gmail.com>  writes:
> >> Oh, but it's worse than that.  When you XLOG a WAL record for each of
> >> those pages, you're going to trigger full-page writes for all of them.
> >>   So now you've turned 1GB of data to write into 2+ GB of data to
> >> write.
> >
> > No, because only the first mod of each VM page would trigger a full page
> > write, at least assuming a reasonable ordering of the operations.
> 
> If you change the LSN on the heap pages, you have to write full page 
> images of those as well.
> 
> Let's recap what happens when a VM bit is set: You set the 
> PD_ALL_VISIBLE flag on the heap page (assuming it's not set already, it 
> usually isn't), and then set the bit in the VM while keeping the heap 
> page locked.

What if we set PD_ALL_VISIBLE on the heap page, wait for a checkpoint to
happen so the heap page is guaranteed to be on disk, then on next read,
if PD_ALL_VISIBLE is set and the VM all-visible bit is not set, set the
VM bit.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
 + It's impossible for everything to be true. +