Re: global temporary tables

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> A couple of recent threads made got me thinking again about the idea
> of global temporary tables. There seem to be two principal issues:

> 1. What is a global temporary table?

> 2. How could we implement that?

> Despite rereading the "idea: global temp tables" thread from April
> 2009 in some detail, I was not able to get a clear understanding of
> (1).

I believe that the spec's distinction between global and local temp
tables has to do with whether they are visible across module
boundaries. Since we haven't implemented modules, that distinction
is meaningless to us. In the spec, *both* types of temp tables have
the property that the definition (schema) of the table is global
across all sessions, and only the content of the table is session-local.

This arrangement clearly is useful for some applications, but so is our
current definition wherein different sessions can have different schemas
for the same temp table name. So eventually it'd be good to support
both. But the GLOBAL/LOCAL TEMP TABLE distinction is something entirely
different. PG's behavior does not correspond to either of those.

Your idea of using the relmapper layer to instantiate copies of temp
tables is an interesting one. It's only a small piece of the puzzle
though. In particular, what you described would result in the table
having the same OID in all sessions, even though the relfilenodes are
different --- amd since locking is done on the basis of OID, that's
probably *not* what we want. It would be much better for performance
if the different sessions' versions of the table were independently
lockable.

I also kind of wonder what is supposed to happen if someone DROPs or
ALTERs the temp table definition ...

regards, tom lane