Re: Fixing flat user/group files at database startup

* Tom Lane (tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us) wrote:
> What I am thinking is that we have to punt on this problem until the
> proposed pg_role catalog is in place. With the grolist array
> representation of group membership replaced by a fixed-width
> pg_role_members catalog, there would be no need to deal with any
> potentially-toasted columns while extracting the data needed for the
> flat files.

While that sounds alright to me, I was wondering if it'd be possible to
take a slightly different approach to it so we could solve it for
8.0.x... We can't build the files very easily during WAL recovery, but
what about if we compare the files to the database after the normal
backend startup? If they're different, regenerate the files. Maybe I'm
missing something here, but that seems pretty straight-forward to me...

Stephen