Re: Bootstrap DATA is a pita

Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> On 2015-02-20 22:19:54 -0500, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> On 2/20/15 8:46 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
>>> Or what about just doing CSV?

>> I don't think that would actually address the problems. It would just
>> be the same format as now with different delimiters.

> Yea, we need hierarchies and named keys.

Yeah. One thought though is that I don't think we need the "data" layer
in your proposal; that is, I'd flatten the representation to something
more like

{
oid => 2249,
oiddefine => 'CSTRINGOID',
typname => 'cstring',
typlen => -2,
typbyval => 1,
...
}

This will be easier to edit, either manually or programmatically I think.
The code that turns it into a .bki file will need to know the exact set
of columns in each system catalog, but it would have had to know that
anyway I believe, if you're expecting it to insert default values.

Ideally the column defaults could come from BKI_ macros in the catalog/*.h
files; it would be good if we could keep those files as the One Source of
Truth for catalog schema info, even as we split out the initial data.

regards, tom lane