On 07/07/2020 12:02, matsumura....@fujitsu.com wrote:
At Monday, July 6, 2020 05:13:40 +0000,  "Kyotaro Horiguchi 
<horikyota(dot)ntt(at)gmail(dot)com>" wrote in
after WAL buffer is filled up to the requested position. So when it
crosses segment boundary we know the all past corss segment-boundary
records are stable. That means all we need to remember is only the
position of the latest corss-boundary record.

I could not agree. In the following case, it may not work well.
- record-A and record-B (record-B is a newer one) is copied, and
- lastSegContRecStart/End points to record-B's, and
- FlushPtr is proceeded to in the middle of record-A.

IIUC, that means record-B is a cross segment-border record and we hav e
flushed beyond the recrod-B. In that case crash recovery afterwards
can read the complete record-B and will finish recovery *after* the
record-B. That's what we need here.

I'm sorry I didn't explain enough.

Record-A and Record-B are cross segment-border records.
Record-A spans segment X and X+1
Record-B spans segment X+2 and X+3.
If both records have been inserted to WAL buffer, lastSegContRecStart/End 
points to Record-B.
If a writer flushes upto the middle of segment-X+1, NotifyStableSegments() 
allows the writer to notify segment-X.
Is my understanding correct?

I think this little ASCII drawing illustrates the above scenario:

        AAAAA  F  BBBBB
|---------|---------|---------|
   seg X    seg X+1   seg X+2

AAAAA and BBBBB are Record-A and Record-B. F is the current flush pointer.

In this case, it would be OK to notify segment X, as long as F is greater than the end of record A. And if I'm reading Kyotaro's patch correctly, that's what would happen with the patch.

The patch seems correct to me. I'm a bit sad that we have to track yet another WAL position (two, actually) to fix this, but I don't see a better way.

I wonder if we should arrange things so that XLogwrtResult.Flush never points in the middle of a record? I'm not totally convinced that all the current callers of GetFlushRecPtr() are OK with a middle-of-WAL record value. Could we get into similar trouble if a standby replicates half of a cross-segment record to a cascaded standby, and the cascaded standby has WAL archiving enabled?

- Heikki


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