Re: FDW state from plan time

Dave Page <dpage(at)pgadmin(dot)org> writes:
> I can't help thinking I must be missing something obvious here, but is
> there any way to persist some data from PlanForeignScan to at least
> BeginForeignScan in an FDW? I'm aware of fdwplan->fdw_private, but at
> that needs to be copyObject compatible, it's not much use to me.

> The issue I have is that in order to properly plan my remote scan, I
> need to connect to the remote database to try to calculate some stats
> for the query. I'm currently then disconnecting and freeing all the
> data associated with that connection, and then reconnecting again in
> BeginForeignScan in order to do the actual work. I'd like to avoid the
> connect/reconnect, as we all know they can be expensive!

I'd suggest that you reference your open connections with an integer
index, which you could then store in the plan node. Plans don't have to
survive longer than the current backend, so this would be perfectly safe
so long as you don't re-use the indexes within a session.

Or you could use a hash of some other identifying information (perhaps
the OID of the foreign server would be sufficient ID for a connection?).

regards, tom lane