Re: Limit on number of users in postgresql?

["John D. Burger" <john(at)mitre(dot)org>]

Tom Lane wrote:

> > What you describe Tom (flat file), sounds a bit strange to me.  
> > Aren't users
> > stored in a table? (pg_catalog.pg_authid)
>
> Yeah, but the postmaster can't read pg_authid, nor any other table,
> because it's not logically connected to the database.  So any change
> to pg_authid gets copied to a "flat" ASCII-text file for the  
> postmaster.

Why doesn't the postmaster read the db files directly, presumably  
using some of the same code the backends do, or is too hard to bypass  
the shared memory layer?  Another thing you folks must have  
considered would be to keep the out-of-memory copies of this kind of  
data in something faster than a flat file - say Berkeley DB.  Do  
either of these things make sense?

- John D. Burger
  MITRE