Re: Extending varlena

On Mon, 18 Aug 2008, Tom Lane wrote:

> What would make more sense is to redesign the large-object stuff to be
> somewhat modern and featureful, and provide stream-access APIs (think
> lo_read, lo_seek, etc) that allow offsets wider than 32 bits.

A few years ago, I was working on such a project for a company I used to
work for. The company changed directions shortly thereafter, and the
project was dropped, but perhaps the patch might still be useful as a
starting point for someone else.

The original patch is
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2005-09/msg01026.php, and the
advice I was working on implementing was in
http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2005-09/msg01063.php

I am attaching the latest version of the patch I found around. As it was
almost 3 years ago, I am a little fuzzy on where I left off, but I do
remember that I was trying to work through the suggestions Tom Lane gave
in that second linked email. I would recommend discarding the libpq
changes, since that seemed to not pass muster.

Note that this patch was against 8.0.3. There only seem to be a few
issues applying it to the current head, but I haven't really dug into them
to see how difficult it would be to update. Luckily, the large object
code is fairly slow-moving, so there aren't too many conflicts. One thing
I did notice is that it looks like someone extracted one of the functions
I wrote in this patch and applied it as a 32-bit version. Good for them.
I'm glad someone got some use out of this project, and perhaps more use
will come of it.

--
At the source of every error which is blamed on the computer you will
find at least two human errors, including the error of blaming it on
the computer.