Re: [HACKERS] interesting observatation regarding views and V7.0

At 05:54 PM 2/23/00 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>Don Baccus <dhogaza(at)pacifier(dot)com> writes:
>> The creation of column aliases for tables referenced by views causes
>> the rule created on the underlying virtual table to be in some cases
>> considerably longer than the corresponding rule in V6.5.
>> In practice, this means that several of the views used in the web
>> toolkit I'm porting no longer can be created.
>
>Yes, this is exactly the concern I raised last week. Thomas didn't
>seem to be very worried about the issue, but when he gets back from
>his vacation we can lean on him to fix it.

OK, I saw some of the exchange last week but was so busy I
didn't really read it, other than to note when he'd committed changes
so I could update and throw the web toolkit at them. The ecommerce
module wasn't part of what I was throwing at it last week since
I knew it wasn't going to get ported from Oracle in time for our
very preliminary first cut at a port. This week, though, hasn't
been as crazy. Otherwise I would've yelped at Thomas a week ago.

"Here, YOU rewrite all these queries that use these views!" :)

>Something else we might consider as a stopgap is to resurrect the
>"compressed text" datatype that Jan wrote, and then removed in
>anticipation of having TOAST. Jan was concerned about creating
>future compatibility problems by having a datatype with only a
>one-release-cycle expected lifetime ... but I think it might be
>OK to use it just internally for rules.

Yeah, that's not a bad idea at all.

Also...interbase's "text" type is apparently compressed, and that's
an interesting idea for "text" itself (as opposed to "varchar()" of
a given size). Someone who just says "text" probably wants to be
able to stuff as much text into the column as possible, I know
I do! The price of compression/decompression is to some extent
balanced by not having to drag as many bytes around during joins
and sorts and the like. Decompression in particular should be
very cheap and in the kind of systems I'm working on one hopes
one's ad, product description, Q&A post etc is selected (read)
many more times than inserted (written). One hopes!

Just an interesting notion...I was kinda excited about lzText when
Jan implemented it, though a smart TOASTer is even more exciting so
I won't whine about the delay.

- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza(at)pacifier(dot)com>
Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest
Rare Bird Alert Service and other goodies at
http://donb.photo.net.