Hackers,

the Slony team has been getting seldom reports of a problem with the txid_snapshot data type.

The symptom is that a txid_snapshot on output lists the same txid multiple times in the xip list part of the external representation. This string is later rejected by txid_snapshot_in() when trying to determine if a particular txid is visible in that snapshot using the txid_visible_in_snapshot() function.

I was not yet able to reproduce this problem in a lab environment. It might be related to subtransactions and/or two phase commit (at least one user is using both of them). The reported PostgreSQL version involved in that case was 9.1.

At this point I would find it extremely helpful to "sanitize" the external representation in txid_snapshot_out() while emitting some NOTICE level logging when this actually happens. I am aware that this does amount to a functional change for a back release, but considering that the _out() generated external representation of an existing binary datum won't pass the type's _in() function, I argue that such change is warranted. Especially since this problem could possibly corrupt a dump.


Comments?


Jan

--
Jan Wieck
Senior Software Engineer
http://slony.info


--
Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org)
To make changes to your subscription:
http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers

Reply via email to