Re-think predicate locking on GIN indexes.

The principle behind the locking was not very well thought-out, and not
documented. Add a section in the README to explain how it's supposed to
work, and change the code so that it actually works that way.

This fixes two bugs:

1. If fast update was turned on concurrently, subsequent inserts to the
   pending list would not conflict with predicate locks that were acquired
   earlier, on entry pages. The included 'predicate-gin-fastupdate' test
   demonstrates that. To fix, make all scans acquire a predicate lock on
   the metapage. That lock represents a scan of the pending list, whether
   or not there is a pending list at the moment. Forget about the
   optimization to skip locking/checking for locks, when fastupdate=off.
2. If a scan finds no match, it still needs to lock the entry page. The
   point of predicate locks is to lock the gabs between values, whether
   or not there is a match. The included 'predicate-gin-nomatch' test
   tests that case.

In addition to those two bug fixes, this removes some unnecessary locking,
following the principle laid out in the README. Because all items in
a posting tree have the same key value, a lock on the posting tree root is
enough to cover all the items. (With a very large posting tree, it would
possibly be better to lock the posting tree leaf pages instead, so that a
"skip scan" with a query like "A & B", you could avoid unnecessary conflict
if a new tuple is inserted with A but !B. But let's keep this simple.)

Also, some spelling  fixes.

Author: Heikki Linnakangas with some editorization by me
Review: Andrey Borodin, Alexander Korotkov
Discussion: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/0b3ad2c2-2692-62a9-3a04-5724f2af9114@iki.fi

1 files changed, 8 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/access/gin/ginfast.c b/src/backend/access/gin/ginfast.c
index 615730b8e55..5f624cf6fac 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/gin/ginfast.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/gin/ginfast.c
@@ -31,6 +31,7 @@
 #include "postmaster/autovacuum.h"
 #include "storage/indexfsm.h"
 #include "storage/lmgr.h"
+#include "storage/predicate.h"
 #include "utils/builtins.h"
 
 /* GUC parameter */
@@ -245,6 +246,13 @@ ginHeapTupleFastInsert(GinState *ginstate, GinTupleCollector *collector)
 	metabuffer = ReadBuffer(index, GIN_METAPAGE_BLKNO);
 	metapage = BufferGetPage(metabuffer);
 
+	/*
+	 * An insertion to the pending list could logically belong anywhere in
+	 * the tree, so it conflicts with all serializable scans.  All scans
+	 * acquire a predicate lock on the metabuffer to represent that.
+	 */
+	CheckForSerializableConflictIn(index, NULL, metabuffer);
+
 	if (collector->sumsize + collector->ntuples * sizeof(ItemIdData) > GinListPageSize)
 	{
 		/*