Re: hyrax vs. RelationBuildPartitionDesc

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> You do? Unless I misunderstood, your options are:

> 1. (the patch you attached) create a temporary memory context that is
> used for everything, then at the end copy the good stuff to CacheMemCxt
> (or a sub-context thereof). This still needs to copy.

> 2. create a temp memory context, do everything there, do retail freeing
> of everything we don't want, reparenting the context to CacheMemCxt.
> Hope we didn't forget to pfree anything.

> How is any of those superior to what I propose?

I doubt that what you're suggesting is terribly workable. It's not
just RelationBuildPartitionDesc that's at issue. Part of what will
be the long-lived data structure is made by partition_bounds_create,
and that invokes quite a boatload of code that both makes the final
data structure and leaks a lot of intermediate junk. Having to be
very careful about permanent vs temporary data throughout all of that
seems like a recipe for bugs.

The existing code in RelationBuildPartitionDesc is already pretty good
about avoiding copying of data other than the output of
partition_bounds_create. In fact, I think it's already close to what
you're suggesting other than that point. So I think --- particularly
given that we need something we can back-patch into v11 --- that we
shouldn't try to do anything much more complicated than what Robert is
suggesting.

regards, tom lane