Re: Inserting heap tuples in bulk in COPY

On Thu, Oct 6, 2011 at 7:33 AM, Heikki Linnakangas
<heikki(dot)linnakangas(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> wrote:
> A regular heap_insert record leaves out a lot of information that can be
> deduced at replay time. It can leave out all the headers, including just the
> null bitmap + data. In addition to that, there's just the location of the
> tuple (RelFileNode+ItemPointer). At replay, xmin is taken from the WAL
> record header.
>
> For a multi-insert record, you don't even need to store the RelFileNode and
> the block number for every tuple, just the offsets.
>
> In comparison, a full-page image will include the full tuple header, and
> also the line pointers. If I'm doing my math right, a full-page image takes
> 25 bytes more data per tuple, than the special-purpose multi-insert record.

Interesting. It's always seemed to me fairly inefficient in general
to store the whole RelFileNode. For many people, the database and
tablespace OID will be constants, and even if they aren't, there
certainly aren't going to be 96 bits of entropy in the relfilenode. I
thought about whether we could create some sort of mapping layer,
where say once per checkpoint we'd allocate a 4-byte integer to denote
a relfilenode, and WAL-log that mapping. Then after that everyone
could just refer to the 4-byte integer instead of the whole
relfilenode. But it seems like a lot of work for 8 bytes per record.
Then again, if you're getting that much benefit from shaving off 25
bytes per tuple, maybe it is, although I feel like FPW is the elephant
in the room.

But I digress...

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company