Re: Extending varlena

David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> writes:
> What would need to happen for the next jump up from where varlena is
> now, to 8 bytes?

Dealing with upwards-of-4GB blobs as single Datums isn't remotely sane,
and won't become so in the near (or even medium) future. So I don't
see the point of doing all the work that would be involved in making
this go.

What would make more sense is to redesign the large-object stuff to be
somewhat modern and featureful, and provide stream-access APIs (think
lo_read, lo_seek, etc) that allow offsets wider than 32 bits. The main
things I think we'd need to consider besides just the access API are

- permissions features (more than "none" anyway)
- better management of orphaned objects (obsoleting vacuumlo)
- support > 16TB of large objects (maybe partition pg_largeobject?)
- dump and restore probably need improvement to be practical for such
large data volumes

regards, tom lane