Re: Pinning a buffer in TupleTableSlot is unnecessary

Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Nov 14, 2016 at 10:23 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I don't believe Andres' claim anyway.  There are certainly cases where an
>> allegedly-valid slot could be pointing at garbage, but table scans aren't
>> one of them, precisely because of the pin held by the slot.  It would take
>> a fairly wide-ranging code review to convince me that it's okay to lose
>> that mechanism.

> I don't understand your objection.  It seems to me that the
> TupleTableSlot is holding a pin, and the scan is also holding a pin,
> so one of them is redundant.  You speculated that the slot could
> continue to point at the tuple after the scan has moved on, but how
> could such a thing actually happen?

You're implicitly assuming that a scan always returns its results in the
same slot, and that no other slot could contain a copy of that data, but
there is no guarantee of either.  See bug #14344 and d8589946d for a
pretty recent example where that failed to be true --- admittedly, for
a tuplesort scan not a table scan.

We could certainly set up some global convention that would make this
universally true, but I think we'd have to do a lot of code-reading
to ensure that everything is following that convention.

Also, there might well be places that are relying on the ability of a
slot to hold a pin for slots that are not simply the return slot of
a plan node.  We could perhaps remove the *use* of this slot feature in
the normal table-scan case, without removing the feature itself.
        regards, tom lane