Re: Bugs in CREATE/DROP INDEX CONCURRENTLY

On 6 October 2012 00:56, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

> 1.  These operations think they can use ordinary heap_update operations
> to change pg_index entries when they don't have exclusive lock on the
> parent table.  The lack of ex-lock means that another backend could be
> currently loading up its list of index OIDs for the table --- and since
> it scans pg_index with SnapshotNow to do that, the heap_update could
> result in the other backend failing to see this index *at all*.  That's
> okay if it causes the other backend to not use the index for scanning...
> but not okay if it causes the other backend to fail to make index
> entries it is supposed to make.
>
> I think this could possibly be fixed by using nontransactional
> update-in-place when we're trying to change indisvalid and/or
> indisready, but I've not really thought through the details.

Only solution there is to fix SnapshotNow, as we discussed last
Christmas. I'll dig out my patch for that, which IIRC I was nervous of
committing at last minute into 9.2.