Re: btreecheck extension

* Peter Geoghegan (pg(at)heroku(dot)com) wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 5:11 PM, Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
> > Now, we could. We could come up with an extensible syntax, like this:
> >
> > CHECK relation [ USING { checktype [ '(' arg [, ...] '}' [, ...] ];
>
> That's what I had in mind. Using the same trick that you came up with
> for EXPLAIN, to avoid grammar bloat and let the am figure out for
> itself what to name the various check types, with a generic default
> check.

I'm fine with having these start out as external tools which are doing
checks, but I've been specifically asked about (and have desired myself
from time-to-time...) an in-core capability to check index/heap/etc
validity. Folks coming from certain other RDBMS's find it amazing that
we don't have any support for that when what they really want is a
background worker which is just automatically going around doing these
checks.

Now, perhaps we could have the background worker without the syntax for
running these by hand, but I don't particularly like that idea. Being
able to run these checks by hand is extremely useful and I'd much prefer
to be able to force that than to have some mechanism where I have to
submit a request for a check to another process through a queue or
something along those lines.

Thanks,

Stephen