Avoid using tuple from syscache for update of pg_database.datfrozenxid

pg_database.datfrozenxid gets updated using an in-place update at the
end of vacuum or autovacuum.  Since 96cdeae, as pg_database has a toast
relation, it is possible for a pg_database tuple to have toast values
if there is a large set of ACLs in place.  In such a case, the in-place
update would fail because of the flattening of the toast values done for
the catcache entry fetched.  Instead of using a copy from the catcache,
this changes the logic to fetch the copy of the tuple by directly
scanning pg_database.

Note that before 96cdeae, attempting to insert such a tuple to
pg_database would cause a "row is too big" error, so the end-of-vacuum
problem was not reachable.

This issue has been originally fixed in 947789f on v14~, and there have
been reports about this problem on v12 and v13, causing failures at the
end of VACUUM.  This completes the fix on all the stable branches where
pg_database can use a toast table, down to 12.

Author: Ashwin Agrawal, Junfeng Yang
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/DM5PR0501MB38800D9E4605BCA72DD35557CCE10@DM5PR0501MB3880.namprd05.prod.outlook.com
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/Y70XNVbUWQsR2Car@paquier.xyz
Backpatch-through: 12

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/src/backend/access/heap/heapam.c b/src/backend/access/heap/heapam.c
index 922744e04db..657af12a399 100644
--- a/src/backend/access/heap/heapam.c
+++ b/src/backend/access/heap/heapam.c
@@ -5837,6 +5837,10 @@ heap_abort_speculative(Relation relation, ItemPointer tid)
  *
  * tuple is an in-memory tuple structure containing the data to be written
  * over the target tuple.  Also, tuple->t_self identifies the target tuple.
+ *
+ * Note that the tuple updated here had better not come directly from the
+ * syscache if the relation has a toast relation as this tuple could
+ * include toast values that have been expanded, causing a failure here.
  */
 void
 heap_inplace_update(Relation relation, HeapTuple tuple)