Re: Removal of temp tables

> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > What else do we do with them except sorts?
>
> Hash joins. Materialize nodes. Not to mention that sorting is used for
> things that aren't obviously sorts (SELECT count(distinct foo), for
> example).

Oh, I didn't know that. OK.

> > Seems
> > pid_ was a good file name because they are always based on pid in
> > storage/file/fd.c. The directory could be called simply 'tempfile' with
> > no pg_. How is that?
>
> You had that to begin with, and I changed it because I thought it was a
> bad idea. The directory name and file name should both make perfectly
> clear that the files are temp files belonging to Postgres. For example,
> it would be unsafe to make pg_tempfiles be a symlink pointing to a temp
> directory shared with other apps if there was any risk of temp file name
> collisions. (Not sure you'd do that anyway, because of security issues,
> but let's not foreclose it with a poor choice of file names.) A purely
> numeric file name for temp files is a particularly bad idea because it
> looks too much like our numeric names for table data files. Don't
> eliminate a hypothetical confusion factor between relnames and filenames
> (which are never seen in the same context anyway) by introducing one
> between filenames and other filenames.

OK, I see, you think it could share a directory with another app. Now I
see why you used pg_temp.

>
> If you don't like pg_temp here, maybe post_temp? pgsql_temp?

OK, pgsql_temp works for me. Everytime I see pg_ I think system table.
I will use pgsql_temp for directory and file names.

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