Thomas Swan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Bruce Momjian wrote: >> The advantage of symlinks is that an administrator could see how things >> are laid out from the command line. >> > That's a poor reason to require symlinks. The administrator can just as > easily open up psql and query pg_tablespace to see that same > information.
Something to keep in mind here is that one of the times you would most likely need that information is when the database is broken and you *can't* simply "open up psql" and inspect system catalogs. I like the fact that a symlink implementation can be inspected without depending on a working database. If we were going to build a non-symlink implementation, I'd want the highlevel-to-lowlevel data transfer to take the form of a flat ASCII file that could be inspected by hand, rather than some hidden in-memory datastructure. But given the previous discussion in this thread, I cannot see any strong reason not to rely on symlinks for the purpose. We are not in the business of building replacements for OS features. regards, tom lane ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 8: explain analyze is your friend