Re: [HACKERS] REINDEX CONCURRENTLY 2.0

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 11:46 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> wrote:
> Michael Paquier wrote:
>> Well, the idea is really to get rid of that as there are already
>> facilities of this kind for CREATE TABLE LIKE in the parser and ALTER
>> TABLE when rewriting a relation. It is not really attractive to have a
>> 3rd method in the backend code to do the same kind of things, for a
>> method that is even harder to maintain than the other two.
>
> I dislike the backend code that uses SPI and manufacturing node to
> re-creates indexes. IMO we should get rid of it. Let's not call it
> "facilities", but rather "grotty hacks".

Aha. You are making my day here ;)

> I think before suggesting to add even more code to perpetuate that idea,
> we should think about going in the other direction. I have not tried to
> write the code, but it should be possible to have an intermediate
> function called by ProcessUtility* which transforms the IndexStmt into
> an internal representation, then calls DefineIndex. This way, all this
> code that wants to create indexes for backend-internal reasons can
> create the internal representation directly then call DefineIndex,
> instead of the horrible hacks they use today creating parse nodes by
> hand.

Yeah, that would be likely possible. I am not volunteering for that in
the short term though..
--
Michael