Re: AW: Re: OID wraparound: summary and proposal

On Mon, 6 Aug 2001, mlw wrote:

> I think you are focusing too much on "ROWID" and not enough on OID. The issue
> at hand is OID. It is a PostgreSQL cluster wide limitation. As data storage
> decreases in price, the likelihood of people running into this limitation
> increases. I have run into OID problems in my curent project. Geez, 40G 7200
> RPM drives are $120, amazing.
Possibly you were using OIDs for what they weren't intended ;)

> Tom has proposed being able to remove the OID from tables, to preserve
> this resource. I originally thought this was a good idea, but there
> are tools and utilities others may want to use in the future that
> require OIDs, thus they would have to be re-written or abandoned
> altogether.
What are these tools?

> It seems to me, I guess and others too, that the OID mechanism should be on a
> per table basis. That way OIDs are much more likely to be unique, and TRUNCATE
> on a table should reset it's OID counter to zero.
I disagree. OID as it is now is a mandatory SERIAL that is added to every
table. Most tables don't need such a field, those which do, well, they can
keep it as it is now (global per-database), or, if you want per-table
sequence, just create a SERIAL field explicitly.