Hi, Tom,
Tom Lane wrote:
> The only way we could pack stuff without alignment is to go over to the
> idea that memory and disk representations are different --- where in
> this case the "conversion" might just be a memcpy to a known-aligned
> location. The performance costs of that seem pretty daunting, however,
> especially when you reflect that simply stepping over a varlena field
> would require memcpy'ing its length word to someplace.
AFAICS, PostGIS already uses this approach internally, mostly because
its current format requires a mix of byte-sized and larger (int, double)
fields.
Markus
--
Markus Schaber | Logical Tracking&Tracing International AG
Dipl. Inf. | Software Development GIS
Fight against software patents in EU! www.ffii.org www.nosoftwarepatents.org
