Databases · Flashcard
What do the xmin and xmax fields in a heap tuple header record?
Why this is the answer
xmin is the inserting transaction and xmax the deleting (or row-locking) transaction, which is what visibility checks compare against a snapshot. They are per-tuple, not per-page bounds, they are set by writers rather than VACUUM, and reads never record anything in them; IDs are transaction IDs, not session IDs.
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