By not visiting the heap page for tuples, index-only scans fail to acquire all of the necessary predicate locks for correct behavior at the serializable transaction isolation level. The tag for the tuple-level predicate locks includes the xmin, to avoid possible problems with tid re-use. (This was not covered in initial pre-release versions of SSI, and testing actually hit the problem.) When an "index-only" scan does need to look at the heap because the visibility map doesn't indicate that the tuple is visible to all transactions, the tuple-level predicate lock is acquired. The best we can do without visiting the heap is a page level lock on the heap page, so that is what the attached patch does.
If there are no objections, I will apply to HEAD and 9.2. -Kevin
index-only-serializable-v1.patch
Description: Binary data
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