Re: Big 7.1 open items

"Hiroshi Inoue" <Inoue(at)tpf(dot)co(dot)jp> writes:
>> Why is a unique ID better than --- or even different from ---
>> using the relation's OID? It seems pointless to me...

> For example,in the implementation of CLUSTER command,
> we would need another new file for the target relation in
> order to put sorted rows but don't we want to change the
> OID ? It would be needed for table re-construction generally.
> If I remember correectly,you once proposed OID+version
> naming for the cases.

Hmm, so you are thinking that the pg_class row for the table would
include this uniqueID, and then committing the pg_class update would
be the atomic action that replaces the old table contents with the
new? It does have some attraction now that I think about it.

But there are other ways we could do the same thing. If we want to
have tablespaces, there will need to be a tablespace identifier in
each pg_class row. So we could do CLUSTER in the same way as we'd
move a table from one tablespace to another: create the new files in
the new tablespace directory, and the commit of the new pg_class row
with the new tablespace value is the atomic action that makes the new
files valid and the old files not.

You will probably say "but I didn't want to move my table to a new
tablespace just to cluster it!" I think we could live with that,
though. A tablespace doesn't need to have any existence more concrete
than a subdirectory, in my vision of the way things would work. We
could do something like making two subdirectories of each place that
the dbadmin designates as a "tablespace", so that we make two logical
tablespaces out of what the dbadmin thinks of as one. Then we can
ping-pong between those directories to do things like clustering "in
place".

Basically I want to keep the bottom-level mechanisms as simple and
reliable as we possibly can. The fewer concepts are known down at
the bottom, the better. If we can keep the pathname constituents
to just "tablespace" and "relation OID" we'll be in great shape ---
but each additional concept that has to be known down there is
another potential problem.

regards, tom lane