Re: Cleaning up unreferenced table files

Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka(at)iki(dot)fi> writes:
> On Sat, 5 Mar 2005, Tom Lane wrote:
>> xlog.c is a fairly random place to put that functionality. Didn't it
>> strike any warning bells for you when you had to add so many new
>> #includes? I'm not entirely sure where this should go, but not there.

> Yeah actually it did, but I forgot about it along the way. How about
> putting it in a file of its own in backend/catalog? There's some code that
> also deals with the data directories. Or straight into backend/storage.

Actually, you could make some case for putting it in utils/init/ beside
flatfiles.c, which has got much the same sort of issues to deal with.

I think though that we ought to first consider the question of whether
we *want* this functionality. On reflection I'm fairly nervous about
the idea of actually deleting anything during startup --- seems like a
good recipe for turning small failures into large failures. But if
we're not going to delete anything then it's questionable whether we
need to code it like this at all. It'd certainly be easier and safer to
examine these tables after the system is up and running normally.

regards, tom lane