I sent two emails last night, one to -patches and one to -hackers. Neither seems to have come through. Has anyone else seen them? I sent this email once already too and it hasn't come through. I'm resending it from a different account now.
On -patches I posted an updated patch that was functionally a noop but changed the macro api to SETVARSIZE(). It also replaced the VARATT_SIZE and VARATT_DATA macros with VARSIZE and VARDATA, changed inet to call detoast, and changed arrays, inet, geometric data types and a handful of others to use SET_VARSIZE instead of accessing a struct member directly. On -hackers I reposted Tom's email where he proposed two sets of bitpatterns with tradeoffs and also included an additional one that was the second of his with the 2-byte cases removed. In it I said that removing the 2-byte cases had no advantages but actually since then I've thought of one. It makes the toaster code simpler since it can just set a bit in the four-byte header just as it does now. It doesn't have to worry about converting to a 2-byte header. So I'm thinking of doing it for now at least. I still think paying 2 bytes on virtually every datum is silly even if mathematically it's only 2% space savings that's still a 2% performance penalty on sequential scans and it gains us nothing except a few lines of code saved in tuptoaster.c. Comments? -- greg ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 9: In versions below 8.0, the planner will ignore your desire to choose an index scan if your joining column's datatypes do not match