Re: Is there a drawback when changing NAMEDATALEN to 64?

Frank Joerdens <frank(at)joerdens(dot)de> writes:
> Is there a drawback when changing NAMEDATALEN to 64? Put the other way
> 'round, what's the thinking behind having a default of 32?

That value was chosen years ago, when machines were slower and disks
smaller than today.

There's been a proposal on the table for awhile to increase the standard
NAMEDATALEN value to 64, but we haven't got round to it.

BTW, there is at least a small potential for breaking applications with
this change: NAMEDATALEN is part of the exported libpq ABI, because it
affects the representation of PGnotify structures. When and if we do
change the standard setting, I'm inclined to reverse the order of the
fields in PGnotify, so that accesses to be_pid don't depend on
NAMEDATALEN.

regards, tom lane