> Not sure if any of this is worth keeping, or if we should just simplify
> the code in heaptuple.c to get rid of the notion of "fixed size"
> varlena attributes. It's certainly not going to be a mainstream case
> anymore, so I question whether the check has any hope of saving more
> cycles than it costs. Yet it seems a shame to wipe out this hack
> entirely...
Not sure if this is relevant (but when does that stop me ;):
The only truly "fixed length" string from a storage standpoint is for
single-byte encodings (and Unicode, I suppose). Eventually, we will need
the notion of both "octet length" *and* "character length" in our
backend code, and for non-ASCII encodings nothing will be of fixed octet
length anyway.
- Thomas
