Re: Big 7.1 open items

Then <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> spoke up and said:
> Precedence: bulk
>
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > But seriously, let me give some background. I used Ingres, that used
> > the VMS file system, but used strange sequential AAAF324 numbers for
> > tables. When someone deleted a table, or we were looking at what tables
> > were using disk space, it was impossible to find the Ingres table names
> > that went with the file. There was a system table that showed it, but
> > it was poorly documented, and if you deleted the table, there was no way
> > to look on the tape to find out which file to restore.
>
> Fair enough, but it seems to me that the answer is to expend some effort
> on system admin support tools. We could do a lot in that line with less
> effort than trying to make a fundamentally mismatched filesystem
> representation do what we need.

We've been an Ingres shop as long as there's been an Ingres. While
we've also had the problem Bruce noticed with table names, we've
*also* used the trivial fix of running a (simple) Report Writer job
each night, immediately before the backup, that lists all of the
database tables/indicies and the underlying files.

True, if someone drops/recreates a table twice between backups we
can't find the intermediate file name, but since we also haven't
backed up that filename, this isn't an issue.

Also, the consistency issue is really not as important as you would
think. If you are restoring a table, you want the information in it,
whether or not it's consistent with anything else. I've done hundreds
of table restores (can you say "modify table to heap"?) and never once
has inconsistency been an issue. Oh, yeah, and we don't shut the
database down for this, either. (That last isn't my choice, BTW.)

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