Re: RFC: Pluggable TOAST

Hi Nikita,

> We need community feedback on previously discussed topic [1].
> There are some long-live issues in Postgres related to the TOAST mechanics, like [2].
> Some time ago we already proposed a set of patches with an API allowing to plug in
> different TOAST implementations into a live database. The patch set introduced a lot
> of code and was quite crude in some places, so after several implementations we decided
> to try to implement it in the production environment for further check-up.
>
> The main idea behind pluggable TOAST is make it possible to easily plug in and use different
> implementations of large values storage, preserving existing mechanics to keep backward
> compatibilitну provide easy Postgres-way give users alternative mechanics for storing large
> column values in a more effective way - we already have custom and very effective (up to tens
> and even hundreds of times faster) TOAST implementations for bytea and JSONb data types.
>
> As we see it - Pluggable TOAST proposes
> 1) changes in TOAST pointer itself, extending it to store custom data - current limitations
> of TOAST pointer were discussed in [1] and [4];
> 2) API which allows calls of custom TOAST implementations for certain table columns and
> (a topic for discussion) certain datatypes.
>
> Custom TOAST could be also used in a not so trivial way - for example, limited columnar storage could be easily implemented and plugged in without heavy core modifications
> of implementation of Pluggable Storage (Table Access Methods), preserving existing data
> and database structure, be upgraded, replicated and so on.
>
> Any thoughts and proposals are welcome.

It seems to me that discarding the previous discussion and starting a
new thread where you ask the community for *another* feedback is not
going to be productive. Pretty sure it's not going to change.

--
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev