Re: Eliminating VACUUM FULL WAS: remove flatfiles.c

Back in September I wrote:
> ... The sticking point --- not only for pg_class,
> but for shared catalogs such as pg_database --- is the lack of a
> way to track relfilenode if it ever changes. What if we keep
> the relfilenode of these critical tables someplace else? For
> instance, we could have a "map" file in each database holding
> the relfilenode of pg_class, and one in $PGDATA/global holding
> the relfilenodes of the shared catalogs and indexes. It'd be
> possible to update a map file atomically via the rename(2) trick.
> Then we teach relcache or some similar place to believe the map
> files over the contents of pg_class.

Thinking about this some more, I can see one small disadvantage:
for the relations that we use the map file for, pg_class.relfilenode
would not be trustworthy. This would not affect most of the system
internals (which will be looking at the relcache's copy, which would
be kept valid by the relcache code). But it would affect user queries,
such as for example attempts to use contrib/oid2name to identify a
file on-disk. The main case where pg_class.relfilenode would be
likely to be out-of-sync is for shared catalogs. We could keep it
up to date in most cases for local catalogs, but there's no hope
of reaching into other databases' pg_class when a shared catalog
is relocated.

What I'd suggest doing about this is:

(1) Store zero in pg_class.relfilenode for those catalogs for which
the map is used. This at least makes it obvious that the value
you're looking at isn't valid.

(2) Provide a SQL function to extract the real relfilenode of any
specified pg_class entry. We'd have to modify oid2name and
pg_dump to know to use the function instead of looking at the
column.

There might be some other client-side code that would be broken
until it got taught about the function, but hopefully not much.

Thoughts?

regards, tom lane