Notes for FDW in PostgreSQL 12

TL;DR: There are some changes in PostgresSQL 12 that FDW authors might be surprised by! Super technical, not suitable for ordinary humans.

OK, so I decided to update my two favourite extension projects (pgsql-http and pgsql-ogr-fdw) yesterday to support PostgreSQL 12 (which is the version currently under development likely to be released in the fall).

Fixing up pgsql-http was pretty easy, involving just one internal function signature change.

Fixing up pgsql-ogr-fdw involved some time in the debugger wondering what had changed.

Your Slot is Empty

When processing an FDW insert/update/delete, your code is expected to take a TupleTableSlot as input and use the data in that slot to apply the insert/update/delete operation to your backend data store, whatever that may be (OGR in my case). The data lived in the tts_values array, and the null flags in tts_isnull .

In PostgreSQL 12, the slot arrives at your ExecInsert/ExecUpdate/ExecDelete callback function empty! The tts_values array is populated with Datum values of 0, yet the tts_isnull array is full of true values. There’s no data to pass back to the FDW source.

What gives?!?

Andres Freund has been slowly laying the groundwork for pluggable storage in PostgreSQL, and one of the things that work has affected is TupleTableSlot . Now when you get a slot, it might not have been fully populated yet, and that is what is happening in the FDW code.

The short-term fix is just to force the slot to populate by calling slot_getallattrs, and then go on with your usual work. That’s what I did. A more future-proof way would be to use slot_getattr and only retrieve the attributes you need (assuming you don’t just need them all).

Your VarLena might have a Short Header

Varlena types are the variable size types, like text , bytea , and varchar . Varlena types store their length and some extra information in a header. The header is potentially either 4 bytes or 1 byte long. Practically it is almost always a 4 byte header. If you call the standard VARSIZE and VARDATA macros on a varlena, the macros assume a 4 byte header.

The assumption has always held (for me), but not any more!

I found that as of PostgreSQL 12, I’m getting back varchar data with a 1-byte header! Surprise!

The fix is to stop assuming a 4-byte header. If you want the size of the varlena data area, less the header, use VARSIZE_ANY_EXHDR instead of VARSIZE() - VARHDRSZ . If you want a pointer into the data area, use VARDATA_ANY instead of VARDATA . The “any” macros first test the header type, and then apply the appropriate macro.

I have no idea what commit caused short varlena headers to make a comeback, but it was fun figuring out what the heck was going on.