Re: Pro et contra of preserving pg_proc oids during pg_upgrade

On 2023-Oct-13, Nikita Malakhov wrote:

> Textual representation requires a long text field because it could
> contain schema, arguments, it is difficult and not effective to be
> saved as part of the data, and must be parsed to retrieve function
> oid.

It is worse than that: the regproc textual representation depends on
search_path. If you store the text now, the meaning could change later,
depending on the search_path that applies at read time.

Of course, the storage for OID is much shorter and not subject to this
problem; but it is subject to the problem that it breaks if you drop and
replace the function, which could happen for instance in an extensions
upgrade script.

I think a better way to store a function's identity is to store the
'identity' column from pg_identify_object(). It is fully qualified and
you can cast to regprocedure with no ambiguity (which gives you an OID,
if you need one). And it should upgrade cleanly.

If you have a regproc column that you want to upgrade, maybe it would
work to do 'ALTER TABLE .. SET TYPE TEXT USING' and turn the value into
pg_identify_object().identity.

--
Álvaro Herrera PostgreSQL Developer — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/