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  • Yorick Peterse's avatar
    Migrate events into a new format · 20d17d1129f6
    Yorick Peterse authored
    This commit migrates events data in such a way that push events are
    stored much more efficiently. This is done by creating a shadow table
    called "events_for_migration", and a table called "push_event_payloads"
    which is used for storing push data of push events. The background
    migration in this commit will copy events from the "events" table into
    the "events_for_migration" table, push events in will also have a row
    created in "push_event_payloads".
    
    This approach allows us to reclaim space in the next release by simply
    swapping the "events" and "events_for_migration" tables, then dropping
    the old events (now "events_for_migration") table.
    
    The new table structure is also optimised for storage space, and does
    not include the unused "title" column nor the "data" column (since this
    data is moved to "push_event_payloads").
    
    == Newly Created Events
    
    Newly created events are inserted into both "events" and
    "events_for_migration", both using the exact same primary key value. The
    table "push_event_payloads" in turn has a foreign key to the _shadow_
    table. This removes the need for recreating and validating the foreign
    key after swapping the tables. Since the shadow table also has a foreign
    key to "projects.id" we also don't have to worry about orphaned rows.
    
    This approach however does require some additional storage as we're
    duplicating a portion of the events data for at least 1 release. The
    exact amount is hard to estimate, but for GitLab.com this is expected to
    be between 10 and 20 GB at most. The background migration in this commit
    deliberately does _not_ update the "events" table as doing so would put
    a lot of pressure on PostgreSQL's auto vacuuming system.
    
    == Supporting Both Old And New Events
    
    Application code has also been adjusted to support push events using
    both the old and new data formats. This is done by creating a PushEvent
    class which extends the regular Event class. Using Rails' Single Table
    Inheritance system we can ensure the right class is used for the right
    data, which in this case is based on the value of `events.action`. To
    support displaying old and new data at the same time the PushEvent class
    re-defines a few methods of the Event class, falling back to their
    original implementations for push events in the old format.
    
    Once all existing events have been migrated the various push event
    related methods can be removed from the Event model, and the calls to
    `super` can be removed from the methods in the PushEvent model.
    
    The UI and event atom feed have also been slightly changed to better
    handle this new setup, fortunately only a few changes were necessary to
    make this work.
    
    == API Changes
    
    The API only displays push data of events in the new format. Supporting
    both formats in the API is a bit more difficult compared to the UI.
    Since the old push data was not really well documented (apart from one
    example that used an incorrect "action" nmae) I decided that supporting
    both was not worth the effort, especially since events will be migrated
    in a few days _and_ new events are created in the correct format.
    20d17d1129f6