Re: Bug? Concurrent COMMENT ON and DROP object

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> 2010/7/6 KaiGai Kohei <kaigai@ak.jp.nec.com>:
>> In the following scenario, we can see orphan comments.

> Yeah.  I think the reason we haven't seen any complaints about this
> before is that the worst-case scenario is that a comment for a dropped
> database object eventually becomes associated with a new database
> object.

Well, in general there is very little DDL locking for any object type
other than tables.  I think the original rationale for that was that
most other object types are defined by single catalog entries, so that
attempts to update/delete the object would naturally block on changing
its tuple anyway.  But between comments and pg_depend entries that seems
not particularly true anymore.

IIRC there is now some attempt to lock objects of all types during
DROP.  Maybe the COMMENT code could acquire a conflicting lock.

>> For example, we need to acquire a lock on the pg_type catalog when we
>> try to comment on any type object. Perhaps, I think LockRelationOid()
>> should be injected at head of the CommentType() in this case.
>> 
>> Any comments?

> A more fine-grained lock would be preferable,

s/preferable/essential/.  This cure would be *far* worse than the
disease.  Can you say "deadlock"?
        regards, tom lane