Postgres distributed lock using PgBouncer connection pooler

[tiago156]

Hello,

my postgres database is behind a PgBouncer connection pooler with transaction pooling and it does not allow prepared statements, so its failing as the Distributed Lock postgres implementation uses prepared statement:

DistributedLock/src/DistributedLock.Postgres/PostgresDatabaseConnection.cs

Line 26 in 00c0f4e

public override bool ShouldPrepareCommands => true;

I was not able to find a way to disable it through configuration/parameters, do you have any recommendation on this case?

Thank you.

[madelson]

@tiago156 this is an interesting issue and not one I was aware of. Suporting this will required a change to the library. A few questions:

• What is the error thrown when this happens?
• Can you point to any pgbouncer/Npgsql docs describing this issue and how to deal with it?
• Is there any way that PosgresDatabaseConnection could detect that pgbouncer is used (e.g. by inspecting the connection string)?

[madelson]

@tiago156 have you looked at https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20150503/prepared-statement-doesnt-exist ? Seems like possibly this is fixable with PG configuration?

[P4rpleSky]

@madelson Is there any reason why you support pg_advisory_lock() but not pg_advisory_xact_lock()? In continuation of our discussion in #175 , I read that with pgbouncer in transaction mode this is the only way to correctly set up advisory locks for PostgreSQL.

[madelson]

@P4rpleSky im not opposed to adding support for that and in fact we do support the equivalent capability for SQL server.

IIRC the reason I didn’t do it initially was that in SQL server I had bad experiences with transaction-based locks. At least on that database keeping transactions open for a long time can cause issues like blocking the transaction log from being flushed. I have no idea if the same is true for Postgres (of course, not all applications need to hold distributed locks for a long time).

can you point me to the resource where you were reading about using transaction-based locks with pg_bouncer?

[P4rpleSky]

@madelson Here are some useful links:

• https://www.pgbouncer.org/features.html
• https://blog.devgenius.io/what-are-postgres-advisory-locks-and-their-use-cases-71ace601e06b
• https://prog.world/synchronizing-applications-using-advisory-locks-postgresql-what-is-it-why-and-the-nuances-of-working-with-pgbouncer/

The problem with prepared statements is just the beginning. My comment above is related to this type of problem: if our application unexpectedly shuts down (or our database connection is closed) while having a session-based lock, we won't be sure that pgbouncer with transaction pooling won't make us a lock forever. With transaction-based locks, we'll guarantee that even in the situation described above, it will be unlocked because the transaction will end.

Maybe this problem is somehow solved by calling pg_sleep in your code, but I'm not sure about it. Can you tell me something about it, please? I will be very grateful!

[droivan]

Hi, @madelson, @tiago156!

Could you please provide an update on whether the issue with accessing the database via PgBouncer has been resolved? Thanks in advance for your assistance.

[madelson]

@P4rpleSky thanks for the great info. I think we should add transactional pg lock support to the library.

would you or @droivan (or anyone else) be interested in contributing?

[madelson]

@tiago156 @P4rpleSky @droivan I've implemented transaction-based locking in the upcoming release. Can anyone confirm that we do not need to disable prepared statements (per the original ask)?

[rafaelkallis]

@madelson I can confirm the prepared statement exception has disappeared once I used UseTransaction().