Re: Documentation on page files

Martijn,

It may be useful to look at the pg_filedump utility located
at http://sources.redhat.com/rhdb/tools.html

This utility dumps out information at the page level and is
commented to help the user understand the format/content of
PostgreSQL heap/index/control files.

Cheers,
Patrick
-----------------
Patrick Macdonald
Red Hat Database

Tom Lane wrote:
>
> Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog(at)svana(dot)org> writes:
> > Chapter 7 of the Developers guide in about the Page Format on disk and it's
> > a little out of date not to mention somewhat incomplete.
>
> Indeed, this seems to have very little relation to reality :-(.
> I didn't even realize that we had such a description in the SGML docs.
> It's obviously not been updated for many years. I'm not sure if the
> "continuation" mechanism it describes ever existed at all, but it sure
> hasn't been there since the code left Berkeley.
>
> > 1. Is there documentation elsewhere (other than the source)?
>
> Not that I can think of. The most accurate information seems to be in
> src/include/storage/bufpage.h; AFAICT all the comments in that file are
> up-to-date. In addition to this it'd be worth pulling out some
> description of the "special space" structures used by the various index
> access methods.
>
> > 2. If not, would patches be accepted to correct the situation?
>
> Go for it.
>
> regards, tom lane
>
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