Alexander Korotkov <aekorotkov@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, Nov 8, 2024 at 4:05 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> I think this is nonsense. What about toasted datums, or even
>> just short-header ones?
> You are correct. I quickly skim trough the sources and didn't find a
> function which compares detoasted contents of Datums excluding
> headers.
Right, there isn't one AFAIK. For context, datumIsEqual() is mainly
meant to support cases such as comparison of Const nodes in equal(),
where
a) false match is unacceptable, but false no-match will at worst
cause some performance loss;
b) the two inputs have probably come through similar paths (eg,
both are fresh from the parser, or both were on-disk), so that
any toasting effects will be the same.
Also
c) for many of the callers, it'd be unsafe to perform disk
access to allow accurate comparison of out-of-line values.
Problem (a) would be all right for this case, and (c) too,
but not so much (b).
You can certainly imagine writing a more aggressive routine
that can cope with detoasting, but I don't think we've yet
found a case where that seemed worth the trouble. Partial
solutions such as "cope with short-header but not compressed
values" have even narrower possible use-cases.
> So, yes, comparison using C-collation seems the most
> reasonable option.
WFM. But I'm concerned that you couldn't build a test case
where the comparison fails. Seems like we need one, in view
of this bug having escaped detection for so long.
regards, tom lane
