Re: [HACKERS] Challenges preventing us moving to 64 bit transactionid (XID)?

On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 10:00 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Ashutosh Bapat <ashutosh.bapat@enterprisedb.com> writes:
>> On Tue, Jun 6, 2017 at 9:48 AM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>>> Storing an epoch implies that rows can't have (xmin,xmax) different by
>>> more than one epoch. So if you're updating/deleting an extremely old
>>> tuple you'll presumably have to set xmin to FrozenTransactionId if it
>>> isn't already, so you can set a new epoch and xmax.
>
>> If the page has multiple such tuples, updating one tuple will mean
>> updating headers of other tuples as well? This means that those tuples
>> need to be locked for concurrent scans?
>
> Locks for tuple header updates are taken at page level anyway, so in
> principle you could run around and freeze other tuples on the page
> anytime you had to change the page's high-order-XID value.  Holding
> the lock for long enough to do that is slightly annoying, but it
> should happen so seldom as to not represent a real performance problem.
>
> In my mind the harder problem is where to find another 32 bits for the
> new page header field.  You could convert the header format on-the-fly
> if there's free space in the page, but what if there isn't?

I guess, we will have to reserve 32 bits in the header. That's much
better than increasing tuple header by 32 bits.

-- 
Best Wishes,
Ashutosh Bapat
EnterpriseDB Corporation
The Postgres Database Company