Re: ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DISTINCT

From: Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)commandprompt(dot)com>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>, ITAGAKI Takahiro <itagaki(dot)takahiro(at)oss(dot)ntt(dot)co(dot)jp>, PostgreSQL-development <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: ALTER TABLE ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET DISTINCT
Date: 2009-04-05 02:31:52
Message-ID: 20090405023152.GC4406@alvh.no-ip.org
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Robert Haas escribió:
> On Sat, Apr 4, 2009 at 7:04 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> > Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> >> Per previous discussion.
> >> http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/8066.1229106059@sss.pgh.pa.us
> >> http://archives.postgresql.org/message-id/603c8f070904021926g92eb55sdfc68141133957c1@mail.gmail.com
> >
> > I'm not thrilled about adding a column to pg_attribute for this.
> > Isn't there some way of keeping it in pg_statistic?
>
> I don't like the idea of keeping it in pg_statistic. Right now, all
> of the data in pg_statistic is transient, so you could theoretically
> truncate the table at any time without losing anything permanent.

Maybe use a new catalog?

> What is the specific nature of your concern? I thought about the
> possibility of a distributed performance penalty that might be
> associated with enlarging pg_attribute, but increasing the size of a
> structure that is already 112 bytes by another 4 doesn't seem likely
> to be significant, especially since we're not crossing a power-of-two
> boundary.

FWIW it has been said that whoever is concerned about pg_attribute bloat
should be first looking at getting rid of the redundant entries for
system columns, for each and every table.

--
Alvaro Herrera http://www.CommandPrompt.com/
PostgreSQL Replication, Consulting, Custom Development, 24x7 support

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