Re: Thoughts on pg_hba.conf rejection

On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> On Tue, Apr 20, 2010 at 2:24 PM, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
>>> 3. We'd have to nail pg_authid, pg_auth_members, and their indexes into
>>> relcache, because relcache.c isn't prepared to cope otherwise.  I doubt
>>> this would affect performance in any material way, but it would eat a
>>> few more kbytes of storage per backend.
>
>> Hmm, I'm not sure I understand why this is necessary or what our other
>> options are.
>
> relcache.c assumes that "critical" relations (those for which we have
> hard-wired descriptors in schemapg.h) are always nailed-in-cache.  In
> the general case this is necessary because we'd not be able to rebuild
> the cache entry if it got discarded; eg, without a pg_class entry you're
> dead in the water.  It's possible we could decouple these attributes;
> for instance develop a notion of being nailed only until authentication
> finishes, or something like that.  I'm not thinking it's worth it
> though.

Well that just begs the question - why do we need a hard-wired
descriptor? Presumably we should only need to hard-wired descriptors
for the relations are used by the relcache code itself to build more
descriptors - so clearly pg_cache and pg_attribute, but beyond that I
don't get it. In particular, I can't see any reason why we couldn't
just build the descriptor for pg_authid etc. by scanning pg_class and
pg_attribute.

...Robert