On Tue, 2002-08-06 at 15:36, Tom Lane wrote:
> "Nigel J. Andrews" <nandrews@investsystems.co.uk> writes:
> > I was thinking of looking at turning names to varchars/text in order to test
> > the performance hit [in the first instance]. However doing a
> > find . -name \*\.\[ch\] | xargs grep NAMEDATALEN | wc -l
> > gives 185 hits and some of those are setting other macros. It seems to
> > me there is a fair amount of work involved in just getting variable
> > length names into the system so that they can be tested.
>
> And that is not even the tip of the iceberg. The real reason that NAME
> is fixed-length is so that it can be accessed as a member of a C
> structure.
I'm not pretending to know anything about it, but can't this be made
into a pointer that is accessed as a member of a C structure. This
should not need rearranging the field order.
And if we were lucky enough, then change from char[32] to char* will be
invisible for most places that use it.
> Moving NAME into the variable-length category would make it
> much more painful to access than it is now, and would require
> rearranging the field order in every system catalog that has a name field.
From what I remember the main concern was lack of support for varlen
types in cache manager (whatever it means) ?
---------------
Hannu
