Re: Pluggable toaster

Hi Nikita,

> Pluggable TOAST API was designed with storage flexibility in mind, and Custom TOAST mechanics is
> free to use any storage methods

Don't you think that this is an arguable design decision? Basically
all we know about the underlying TableAM is that it stores tuples
_somehow_ and that tuples have TIDs [1]. That's it. We don't know if
it even has any sort of pages, whether they are fixed in size or not,
whether it uses shared buffers, etc. It may not even require TOAST.
(Not to mention the fact that when you have N TOAST implementations
and M TableAM implementations now you have to run N x M compatibility
tests. And this doesn't account for different versions of Ns and Ms,
different platforms and different versions of PostgreSQL.)

I believe the proposed approach is architecturally broken from the beginning.

It looks like the idea should be actually turned inside out. I.e. what
would be nice to have is some sort of _framework_ that helps TableAM
authors to implement TOAST (alternatively, the rest of the TableAM
except for TOAST) if the TableAM is similar to the default one. In
other words the idea is not to implement alternative TOASTers that
will work with all possible TableAMs but rather to simplify the task
of implementing an alternative TableAM which is similar to the default
one except for TOAST. These TableAMs should reuse as much common code
as possible except for the parts where they differ.

Does it make sense?

Sorry, I realize this will probably imply a complete rewrite of the
patch. This is the reason why one should start proposing changes from
gathering the requirements, writing an RFC and run it through several
rounds of discussion.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/tableam.html

--
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev