Count individual SQL commands in pg_restore's --transaction-size mode.
The initial implementation in commit
959b38d77 counted one action
per TOC entry (except for some special cases for multi-blob BLOBS
entries). This assumes that TOC entries are all about equally
complex, but it turns out that that assumption doesn't hold up very
well in binary-upgrade mode. For example, even after the previous
commit I was able to cause backend bloat with tables having many
inherited constraints. There may be other cases too. (Since no
serious problems have been reported with --single-transaction mode,
we can conclude that the backend copes well with psql's regular
restore scripts; but before
959b38d77 we never ran binary-upgrade
restores with multi-command transactions.)
To fix, count multi-command TOC entries as N actions, allowing the
transaction size to be scaled down when we hit a complex TOC entry.
Rather than add a SQL parser to pg_restore, approximate "multi
command" by counting semicolons in the TOC entry's defn string.
This will be fooled by semicolons appearing in string literals ---
but the error is in the conservative direction, so it doesn't seem
worth working harder. The biggest risk is with function/procedure
TOC entries, but we can just explicitly skip those.
(This is undoubtedly a hack, and maybe someday we'll be able to
revert it after fixing the backend's bloat issues or rethinking
what pg_dump emits in binary upgrade mode. But that surely isn't
a project for v17.)
Thanks to Alexander Korotkov for the let's-count-semicolons idea.
Per report from Justin Pryzby. Back-patch to v17 where txn_size mode
was introduced.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/ZqEND4ZcTDBmcv31@pryzbyj2023