Re: [HACKERS] LONG

> I thought to use a regular table. Of course, it will eat
> buffers, but managing external files or even large objects
> for it IMHO isn't that simple, if you take transaction
> commit/abort and MVCC problematic into account too. And IMHO
> this is something that must be covered, because I meant to
> create a DATATYPE that can be used as a replacement for TEXT
> if that's too small, so it must behave as a regular datatype,
> without any restrictions WRT beeing able to rollback etc.

In fact, you could get fancy and allow an update of a non-pg_long using
column to not change pg_long at all. Just keep the same value in the
column. If the transaction fails or succeeds, the pg_long is the same
for that tuple. Of course, because an update is a delete and then an
insert, that may be hard to do. For very long fields, it would be a win
for UPDATE. You certainly couldn't do that with chained tuples.

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