Re: Support for REINDEX CONCURRENTLY

Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net> writes:
> Yeah, what's the risk to renaming an index during concurrent access?

SnapshotNow searches for the pg_class row could get broken by *any*
transactional update of that row, whether it's for a change of relname
or some other field.

A lot of these problems would go away if we rejiggered the definition of
SnapshotNow to be more like MVCC.  We have discussed that in the past,
but IIRC it's not exactly a simple or risk-free change in itself.
Still, maybe we should start thinking about doing that instead of trying
to make REINDEX CONCURRENTLY safe given the existing infrastructure.
        regards, tom lane