Correctly deallocate prepared statements if we fail inside a transaction

- Addresses issue #12330

Overview
========

Cached postgres prepared statements become invalidated if the schema
changes in a way that it affects the returned result.

Examples:
- adding or removing a column then doing a 'SELECT *'
- removing the foo column  then doing a 'SELECT bar.foo'

In normal operation this isn't a problem, we can rescue the error,
deallocate the prepared statement and re-issue the command.

However in PostgreSQL transactions, once any command fails, the
transaction becomes 'poisoned' and any subsequent commands will raise
InFailedSQLTransaction.

This includes DEALLOCATE statements, so the default deallocation
strategy instead of removing the cached prepared statement instead
raises InFailedSQLTransaction.

Why this is bad
===============

1. InFailedSQLTransaction is a fairly cryptic error and doesn't
communicate any useful information about what has actually gone wrong.
2. In the naive implementation the prepared statement never gets
deallocated - it stays alive for the length of the session taking up
memory on the postgres server.
3. It is unsafe to retry the transaction because the bad prepared
statement is still in the cache and we would see the exact same failure
repeated.

Solution
========

If we are outside a transaction we can continue to handle these failures
gracefully in the usual way.

Inside a transaction instead of issuing a DEALLOCATE command that will
certainly fail, we now raise
ActiveRecord::PreparedStatementCacheExpired.

This can be handled further up the stack, notably inside
TransactionManager#within_new_transaction. Here we can make sure to
first rollback the transaction, then safely issue DEALLOCATE statements
to invalidate the rest of the cached prepared statements.

This also allows the user (or some gem) the opportunity to catch this error and
voluntarily retry the transaction if a schema change causes the prepared
statement cache to become invalidated.

Because the outdated statement has been deallocated, we can expect the
transaction to succeed on the second try.

1 files changed, 13 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/transaction.rb b/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/transaction.rb
index 295a7bed87..447c809e85 100644
--- a/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/transaction.rb
+++ b/activerecord/lib/active_record/connection_adapters/abstract/transaction.rb
@@ -182,7 +182,10 @@ module ActiveRecord
         transaction = begin_transaction options
         yield
       rescue Exception => error
-        rollback_transaction if transaction
+        if transaction
+          rollback_transaction
+          after_failure_actions(transaction, error)
+        end
         raise
       ensure
         unless error
@@ -208,7 +211,16 @@ module ActiveRecord
       end
 
       private
+
         NULL_TRANSACTION = NullTransaction.new
+
+        # Deallocate invalidated prepared statements outside of the transaction
+        def after_failure_actions(transaction, error)
+          return unless transaction.is_a?(RealTransaction)
+          return unless error.is_a?(ActiveRecord::PreparedStatementCacheExpired)
+          @connection.clear_cache!
+        end
+
     end
   end
 end