Re: Adjusting index special storage for pg_filedump's convenience

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

>
> That's a clever trick, but I can't help thinking we really should have
> an explicit field in the page header to indicate what kind of a page it
> is. It would make life simpler for any external tools that want to peek
> into pages, including migration utilities after a release or two. We've
> also been talking about setting hint bits and doing some kind of retail
> vacuuming in bgwriter with HOT. To do that, we need to identify heap
> pages in the bgwriter. While heap pages can currently be identified by
> the fact that they don't have a special area, it feels hackish, and we
> might want to do something like that for index pages too in the future.
>
> We now have a 16-bit pd_flags field in the page header. We could use a
> few bits from that.
>

+1

or add one extra field

Zdenek