Re: [Patch] Temporary tables that do not bloat pg_catalog (a.k.a fast temp tables)

Hello.

Thanks everyone for great comments!

> Well, jokes aside, that's a pretty lousy excuse for not writing any
> docs

I think maybe I put it in a wrong way. There are currently a lot of
comments in a code, more then enough to understand how this feature
works. What I meant is that this is not a final version of a patch and
a few paragraphs are yet to be written. At least it's how I see it. If
you believe that some parts of the code are currently hard to understand
and some comments could be improved, please name it and I will be happy
to fix it.

> IMHO if this patch gets in, we should use it as the only temp table
> implementation (Or can you think of cases where keeping rows in
> pg_class has advantages?). That'd also eliminate the need for FAST
> keyword in the CREATE TABLE command.

> Probably has zero value to have slow and fast temp tables (from
> catalogue cost perspective). So the FAST implementation should be used
> everywhere.

If there are no objections I see no reason no to do it in a next
version of a patch.

> I'm getting failures in the regression suite

I've run regression suite like 10 times in a row in different
environments with different build flags but didn't manage to reproduce
it. Also our DBAs are testing this feature for weeks now on real-world
applications and they didn't report anything like this. Could you
please describe how to reproduce this issue?

> This should to work on slaves - it is one of ToDo

Glad you noticed! In fact I'm currently researching a possibility of
using the same approach for creating writable temporary tables on
replicas.

> The key reason why I don't think that's negotiable is that if there
> aren't (apparently) catalog entries corresponding to the temp tables,
> that will almost certainly break many things in the backend and
> third-party extensions, not only user code patterns like this one.

> In short, I think that the way to make something like this work is to
> figure out how to have "virtual" catalog rows describing a temp table.

I'm afraid once again I put it in a wrong way. What I meant by
"Information about these tables is stored not in a catalog but in
backend's memory" is in fact that _records_ of pg_class, pg_type and
other catalog relations are stored in-memory. Naturally this records
are visible to the user (otherwise \d or \d+ would not work) and you
can do queries like ` select * from pg_class where relname = 'tt1' `.
In other words part of the catalog is indeed "virtual".

> I didn't see support for memory store for column's statistics. Some
> separate questions is about production statistics -
> pg_stat_user_table, ..

> That seems to work (both analyze and pg_stat_user_tables). Not sure
> where it's in the code, and I'm not willing to reverse engineer it.

Right, `ANALYZE temp_table;` and everything else works. Besides
pg_class, pg_type, pg_attribute and other relations pg_statistic
records for temp tables are stored in-memory as well. IIRC a lot of
pg_stat* relations are in fact views and thus don't require any special
support. If you see that some statistics are broken please don't
hesitate to report it and I will fix it.

Hope I answered all questions so far. I look forward to receive more
comments and questions regarding this patch!

--
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev