Re: relfilenode statistics

On Mon, Dec 15, 2025 at 12:48:25PM -0500, Andres Freund wrote:
> I don't think this is true as stated. Two reasons:
>
> 1) This afaict guarantees that the relfilenode will not clash with oids, but
> it does *NOT* guarantee that it does not clash with other relfilenodes
>
> 2) Note that GetNewRelFileNumber() does *NOT* check for conflicts when
> creating a new relfilenode for an existing relation:
> * If the relfilenumber will also be used as the relation's OID, pass the
> * opened pg_class catalog, and this routine will guarantee that the result
> * is also an unused OID within pg_class. If the result is to be used only
> * as a relfilenumber for an existing relation, pass NULL for pg_class.

FWIW, I am also still troubled by the part of the proposed patch set
where we are trying to hide the idea of a partitioned table has a
relfilenode set by using its relid instead in the key for the data.
This leads to a huge amount of complexity in the patch, mainly to
store data for autovacuum that we do not need at the end:
- autovacuum discards partitioned tables in do_autovacuum(), so the
stats related to partitioned tables that we need to select the
relations does not matter.
- manual vacuums may include partitioned tables to extract its
partitions, vacuum_rel() at the end discarding them. Well, stats
don't matter anyway.

We only need to attach three fields to let autovacuum know if a
relation needs to run or not: dead_tuples, ins_since_vacuum,
mod_since_analyze. Most the fields of PgStat_StatTabEntry make sense
only for tables, few are required by indexes for pg_stat_all_indexes.
Some fields actually make sense because they refer to on-disk files,
mostly for pg_statio_all_tables (blocks_fetched, blocks_hit).

Hence, why don't we split PgStat_StatTabEntry into three things from
the start, even if it means to duplicate some of them? Say:
- Table fields: includes [auto]vacuum/analyze data, block fields,
fields of pg_stat_all_tables.
- Index fields: no need for the [auto]vacuum/analyze time and counts,
block fields, pg_stat_all_indexes fields.
- Relfilenode fields: dead_tuples, ins_since_vacuum and
mod_since_analyze. Does not apply to partitioned tables and indexes,
only applies to tables. Provides a clean split, embrace the fact that
these are the only three fields we need to worry about during
recovery.
--
Michael