Re: Extending varlena

On Mon, Aug 18, 2008 at 04:22:56PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> writes:
> > What would need to happen for the next jump up from where varlena
> > is now, to 8 bytes?
>
> Dealing with upwards-of-4GB blobs as single Datums isn't remotely
> sane, and won't become so in the near (or even medium) future. So I
> don't see the point of doing all the work that would be involved in
> making this go.

OK

> What would make more sense is to redesign the large-object stuff to
> be somewhat modern and featureful, and provide stream-access APIs
> (think lo_read, lo_seek, etc) that allow offsets wider than 32 bits.

Great!

> The main things I think we'd need to consider besides just the
> access API are
>
> - permissions features (more than "none" anyway)

Would ROLEs work, or are you thinking of the per-row and per-column
access controls people sometimes want?

> - better management of orphaned objects (obsoleting vacuumlo)
> - support > 16TB of large objects (maybe partition pg_largeobject?)
> - dump and restore probably need improvement to be practical for such
> large data volumes

That, and the usual upgrade-in-place :)

Cheers,
David.
--
David Fetter <david(at)fetter(dot)org> http://fetter.org/
Phone: +1 415 235 3778 AIM: dfetter666 Yahoo!: dfetter
Skype: davidfetter XMPP: david(dot)fetter(at)gmail(dot)com

Remember to vote!
Consider donating to Postgres: http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate