Re: patch submission: truncate trailing nulls from heap rows to reduce the size of the null bitmap

Jameison Martin <jameisonb(at)yahoo(dot)com> writes:
> [separate topic: pluggable heap manager]
> I'm quite interested in pursuing more aggressive compression
> strategies, and I'd like to do so in the context of the heap
> manager. I'm exploring having a pluggable heap manager implementation
> and would be interested in feedback on that as a general approach. My
> thinking is that I'd like to be able to have PostgreSQL support
> multiple heap implementations along the lines of how multiple index
> types are supported, though probably only the existing heap manager
> implementation would be part of the actual codeline.

There's been some previous talk about "pluggable heap managers"; you
might try searching our archives. Unfortunately the story is not very
good, especially if what you are really interested in is playing games
with the format of heap tuples. We just haven't got an abstraction
boundary that isolates that very well. I think the first thing that
would have to be worked out before we could even discuss having multiple
heap managers is where the abstraction boundary would get drawn and how
we'd have to refactor existing code to make it fly.

> If I do decide to pursue this, can anyone suggest the best way solicit
> feedback?

Usually people just post proposals for discussion on pgsql-hackers.
Obviously, at the early stages such a proposal might be pretty vague,
but that's fine as long as you can explain what kind of feedback you're
hoping for.

regards, tom lane