Re: Support for VACUUMing Foreign Tables

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 01:05:02AM +0000, tsunakawa(dot)takay(at)fujitsu(dot)com wrote:
> Could you let us imagine more concretely how useful it will be?
> While TRUNCATE can be part of an application's data processing as
> alternative to DELETE, I think VACUUM is purely the data storage
> maintenance that's performed by the DBA and can be done naturally
> locally on the server where the table resides. (The existing
> ANALYZE on FDW is an exception; it's useful to also have data
> statistics locally.)

The concept of vacuuming applies to PG because of its concepts behind
MVCC. Thinking broader, in which aspect can that apply to FDWs in
general?

> How about adding a routine to the FDW interface that allows to
> execute an arbitrary command like the following? VACUUM will be
> able to use this.
>
> PGresult *DoCommandPathThrough(ForeignTable *table, const char *command);
>
> Or, maybe it's more flexible to use ForeignServer instead of ForeignTable.

Being able to pass down to remote servers arbitrary command strings
sounds like a recipy for security holes, IMO.
--
Michael