Re: Large expressions in indexes can't be stored (non-TOASTable)

On Wed, Sep 04, 2024 at 03:20:33PM -0400, Jonathan S. Katz wrote:
> On 9/4/24 3:08 PM, Tom Lane wrote:
>> Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> > Thanks to commit 96cdeae, only a few catalogs remain that are missing TOAST
>> > tables: pg_attribute, pg_class, pg_index, pg_largeobject, and
>> > pg_largeobject_metadata. I've attached a short patch to add one for
>> > pg_index, which resolves the issue cited here. This passes "check-world"
>> > and didn't fail for a few ad hoc tests (e.g., VACUUM FULL on pg_index). I
>> > haven't spent too much time investigating possible circularity issues, but
>> > I'll note that none of the system indexes presently use the indexprs and
>> > indpred columns.
>>
>> Yeah, the possibility of circularity seems like the main hazard, but
>> I agree it's unlikely that the entries for system indexes could ever
>> need out-of-line storage. There are many other things that would have
>> to be improved before a system index could use indexprs or indpred.
>
> Agreed on the unlikeliness of that, certainly in the short-to-mid term. The
> impetus driving this is dealing with a data type that can be quite large,
> and it's unlikely system catalogs will be dealing with anything of that
> nature, or requiring very long expressions that couldn't be encapsulated in
> a different way.

Any objections to committing this? I've still been unable to identify any
breakage, and adding it now would give us ~1 year of testing before it'd be
available in a GA release. Perhaps we should at least add something to
misc_sanity.sql that verifies no system indexes are using pg_index's TOAST
table.

--
nathan