Re: ALTER TABLE ... SET STORAGE does not propagate to indexes

On 2020-03-30 18:17, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
> On 2020-Feb-25, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> An alternative would be that we make this situation fully supported. Then
>> we'd probably need at least ALTER INDEX ... ALTER COLUMN ... SET STORAGE,
>> and some pg_dump support.
>
> I think this is a more promising direction.

I have started implementing the ALTER INDEX command, which by itself
isn't very hard, but it requires significant new infrastructure in
pg_dump, and probably also a bit of work in psql, and that's all a bit
too much right now.

An alternative for the short term is the attached patch. It's the same
as before, but I have hacked up the test_decoding test to achieve the
effect of ALTER INDEX with direct catalog manipulation. This preserves
the spirit of the test case, but allows us to fix everything else about
this situation.

One thing to remember is that the current situation is broken. While
you can set index columns to have different storage than the
corresponding table columns, pg_dump does not preserve that, because it
dumps indexes after ALTER TABLE commands. So at the moment, having
these two things different isn't really supported. The proposed patch
just makes this behave consistently and allows adding an ALTER INDEX
command later on if desired.

--
Peter Eisentraut http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services