Summary:
auto_prefix_mode is designed to use prefix filtering in a
particular "safe" set of cases where the upper bound and the seek key
have different prefixes: where the upper bound is the "same length
immediate successor". These conditions are not sufficient to guarantee
the same iteration results as total_order_seek if the DB contains
"short" keys, less than the "full" (maximum) prefix length.
We are not simply disabling the optimization in these successor cases
because it is likely that users are essentially getting what they want
out of existing usage. Especially if users are constructing successor
bounds with the intention of doing a prefix-bounded seek, the existing
behavior is more expected than the total_order_seek behavior.
Consequently, for now we reconcile the bad specification of behavior by
documenting the existing mismatch with total_order_seek.
A closely related issue affects hypothetical comparators like
ReverseBytewiseComparator: if they "correctly" implement
IsSameLengthImmediateSuccessor, auto_prefix_mode could omit more
entries (other than "short" keys noted above). Luckily, the built-in
ReverseBytewiseComparator has an "incorrect" implementation of
IsSameLengthImmediateSuccessor that effectively prevents prefix
optimization and, thus, the bug. This is now documented as a new
constraint on IsSameLengthImmediateSuccessor, and the implementation
tweaked to be simply "safe" rather than "incorrect".
This change also includes unit test updates to demonstrate the above
issues. (Test was cleaned up for readability and simplicity.)
Intended follow-up:
* Tweak documented axioms for prefix_extractor (more details then)
* Consider some sort of fix for this case. I don't know what that would
look like without breaking the performance of existing code. Perhaps
if all keys in an SST file have prefixes that are "full length," we can track
that fact and use it to allow optimization with the "same length
immediate successor", but that would only apply to new files.
* Consider a better system of specifying prefix bounds
Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/pull/10144
Test Plan: test updates included
Reviewed By: siying
Differential Revision: D37052710
Pulled By: pdillinger
fbshipit-source-id: 5f63b7d65f3f214e4b143e0f9aa1749527c587db
Peter Dillinger