Re: WIP: a way forward on bootstrap data

Tom Lane wrote:
> Alvaro Herrera <alvherre(at)alvh(dot)no-ip(dot)org> writes:
> > Others: Now is the time to raise concerns related to the proposed file
> > formats and tooling, so please do have a look when you have a moment.
> > At this stage, the proposed data format seems a good choice to me.
>
> It's not very clear to me what the proposed data format actually is,
> and I don't really want to read several hundred KB worth of patches
> in order to reverse-engineer that information. Nor do I see
> anything in the patch list that obviously looks like it updates
> doc/src/sgml/bki.sgml to explain things.
>
> So could we have an explanation of what it is we're agreeing to?

Here's a small sample pg_proc entry:

{ oid => '2147', descr => 'number of input rows for which the input expression is not null',
n => 'count', proisagg => 't', v => 'i', p => 's', rt => 'int8', at => 'any', s => 'aggregate_dummy' },

An pg_amop entry:
{ opf => 'btree/integer_ops', lt => 'int2', rt => 'int2', str => '1', oper => '<(int2,int2)', am => 'btree' },

Notes:
1. this is Perl data; it is read with 'eval' without any external modules.
2. the pg_proc entry has been compressed to two lines, to avoid
content-free lines that would easily confuse git merge, but keep line
length reasonable.
3. references to objects in other catalogs are by name, such as "int8"
or "btree/integer_ops" rather than OID.
4. for each attribute, an abbreviation can be declared. In the
pg_proc sample we have "n" which stands for proname, because we have
this line:
+ NameData proname BKI_ABBREV(n);

I think John has gone overboard with some of these choices, but we can
argue the specific choices once we decide that abbreviation is a good
idea. (Prior discussion seems to suggest we already agreed on that.)

--
Álvaro Herrera https://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services