Re: Bootstrap DATA is a pita

* Andrew Dunstan (andrew(at)dunslane(dot)net) wrote:
> On 03/07/2015 05:46 PM, Andres Freund wrote:
> >On 2015-03-07 16:43:15 -0600, Jim Nasby wrote:
> >>Semi-related... if we put some special handling in some places for bootstrap
> >>mode, couldn't most catalog objects be created using SQL, once we got
> >>pg_class, pg_attributes and pg_type created? That would theoretically allow
> >>us to drive much more of initdb with plain SQL (possibly created via
> >>pg_dump).
> >Several people have now made that suggestion, but I *seriously* doubt
> >that we actually want to go there. The overhead of executing SQL
> >commands in comparison to the bki stuff is really rather
> >noticeable. Doing the majority of the large number of insertions via SQL
> >will make initdb noticeably slower. And it's already annoyingly
> >slow. Besides make install it's probably the thing I wait most for
> >during development.
>
> My reaction exactly. We should not make users pay a price for
> developers' convenience.

Just to clarify, since Jim was responding to my comment, my thought was
*not* to use SQL commands inside initdb, but rather to use PG to create
the source files that we have today in our tree, which wouldn't slow
down initdb at all.

> >That's besides the fact that SQL commands aren't actually that
> >comfortably editable in bulk.
>
> Indeed.

No, they aren't, but having the data in a table in PG, with a way to
easily export to the format needed by BKI, would make bulk updates much
easier..

Thanks!

Stephen