Re: Pie-in-sky dreaming about reworking tuple layout entirely

On 10/3/06, Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
>
> I can't shake the feeling that merely tweaking the way our varlenas work with
> a shortvarlena or with compressed varlena headers is missing the real source
> of our headaches. It seems very strange to me to be trying to step through a
> tuple with length bits at the head of every field. It's a lot of work spent
> dealing with a terribly inconvenient format when we can pick the format to be
> whatever we like.

one advantage of the current system is that columns with nulls do not
require any storage. so you can alter table add column for free on a
really big table. ISTM that your approch would require moving all the
static fields in if you added a static field regardless, right?

merlin