Tom, * Tom Lane (t...@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote: > Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> writes: > > * Tom Lane (t...@sss.pgh.pa.us) wrote: > >> Yeah. I'm not very impressed by the underlying assumption that it's > >> okay for client-side code to hard-wire knowledge about what indoption > >> bits mean, but not okay for it to hard-wire knowledge about which index > >> AMs use which indoption bits. There's something fundamentally wrong > >> in that. We don't let psql or pg_dump look directly at indoption, so > >> why would we think that third-party client-side code should do so? > > > For my 2c, I'd like to see pg_dump able to use the catalog tables to > > derive the index definition, just as they manage to figure out table > > definitions without (for the most part) using functions. More > > generally, I believe we should be working to reach a point where we can > > reconstruct all objects in the database using just the catalog, without > > any SQL bits being provided from special functions which access > > information that isn't available at the SQL level. > > No, I reject that entirely. It would be insane for example to expect that > random client-side code should be able to interpret the node trees stored > in places like pg_index.indexprs. It's barely possible that we could > maintain such logic in pg_dump, though having to maintain a different > version for each supported server branch would be a giant PITA. But do > you also want to maintain translated-into-Java copies of each of those > libraries for the benefit of JDBC? Or any other language that client > code might be written in?
Honestly, I anticipated the focus on the pg_get_expr() and should have explicitly commented on it. I agree that we shouldn't look to have pg_dump or client utilities be able to understand node trees and that, instead, we should continue to provide a way for those to be reconstructed into SQL expressions. > Now, obviously knowing which bit in pg_index.indoption does what would be > a few orders of magnitude less of a maintenance hazard than knowing what > expression node trees contain. But that doesn't make it a good > future-proof thing for clients to be doing. If the answer to the question > "why do you need access to pg_am.amcanorder?" is "so I can interpret the > bits in pg_index.indoption", I think it's clear that we've got an > abstraction failure that is not going to be fixed by just exposing > something equivalent to the old pg_am definition. I agree- asking clients to interpret the bits in pg_index.indoption isn't the right answer either. > Building on the has-property approach Andrew suggested, I wonder if > we need something like pg_index_column_has_property(indexoid, colno, > propertyname) with properties like "sortable", "desc", "nulls first". Right, this makes sense to me. The point which I was trying to get at above is that we should be able to replace most of what is provided in pg_get_indexdef() by using this function to rebuild the CREATE INDEX command- again, similar to how we build a CREATE TABLE command rather than simply provide a 'pg_get_tabledef()'. Thanks! Stephen
signature.asc
Description: Digital signature