Re: Viability of VARLENA_FIXED_SIZE()

From: Thomas Lockhart <lockhart(at)alumni(dot)caltech(dot)edu>
To: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
Cc: Jan Wieck <janwieck(at)Yahoo(dot)com>, pgsql-hackers(at)postgreSQL(dot)org
Subject: Re: Viability of VARLENA_FIXED_SIZE()
Date: 2000-09-04 17:47:13
Message-ID: 39B3E021.5B126738@alumni.caltech.edu
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> Not sure if any of this is worth keeping, or if we should just simplify
> the code in heaptuple.c to get rid of the notion of "fixed size"
> varlena attributes. It's certainly not going to be a mainstream case
> anymore, so I question whether the check has any hope of saving more
> cycles than it costs. Yet it seems a shame to wipe out this hack
> entirely...

Not sure if this is relevant (but when does that stop me ;):

The only truly "fixed length" string from a storage standpoint is for
single-byte encodings (and Unicode, I suppose). Eventually, we will need
the notion of both "octet length" *and* "character length" in our
backend code, and for non-ASCII encodings nothing will be of fixed octet
length anyway.

- Thomas

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