Re: Reducing relation locking overhead

On 02 Dec 2005 15:25:58 -0500, Greg Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> wrote:
> I suspect this comes out of a very different storage model from Postgres's.
>
> Postgres would have no trouble building an index of the existing data using
> only shared locks. The problem is that any newly inserted (or updated) records
> could be missing from such an index.
>
> To do it you would then have to gather up all those newly inserted records.
> And of course while you're doing that new records could be inserted. And so
> on. There's no guarantee it would ever finish, though I suppose you could
> detect the situation if the size of the new batch wasn't converging to 0 and
> throw an error.

After you're mostly caught up, change locking behavior to block
further updates while the final catchup happens. This could be driven
by a hurestic that says make up to N attempts to catch up without
blocking, after that just take a lock and finish the job. Presumably
the catchup would be short compared to the rest of the work.

Are their enviroments which could not tolerate even this minimal hit?
Probably, which leaves the choice of telling them 'don't reindex then'
or providingaA knob which would tell it to never block (would just try
N times and then give up, failing the reindex).