Re: OID Perfomance - Object-Relational databases - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Kevin Field
Subject Re: OID Perfomance - Object-Relational databases
Date
Msg-id 4565b72a.49710e4a.51dd.64f4@mx.google.com
Whole thread Raw
Responses Re: OID Perfomance - Object-Relational databases  (Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>)
List pgsql-general
Hi everyone,

I just came across a thread in the pgsql archives from October 2000, and found this post particularly interesting:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-sql/2000-10/msg00044.php

...because I had already been designing something similar but on a larger scale, for an integrated information system
withscheduling, accounting, internal messaging, inventory, safety management, and slew of other things.  Initially when
Iread through the pgsql docs, I decided that I didn't ever want to deal with wraparound, and so I wouldn't use OIDs.
Butas I've been designing and implementing prototypes of this system, I've found it less than elegant to have universal
references,because I always need to have a table name involved.  Recently I clued in that OIDs could solve this, so I
wentlooking through the archives and found that thread.  I'm just wondering a few things. 

First, how would Michael/Tom's suggestion (to have a single sequence used by multiple tables) work exactly, i.e., if I
hada number from that sequence, how would I know which table it belonged to without checking *all* of the tables for a
rowwith that ID number?  Josh said he would try the idea and report back on performance...how did this all turn out? 

If there's an answer to that question, then is it conceivable to use an int8 sequence across, say, 100 tables (which
theremay well be in the pool of things I would want to be able to arbitrarily reference by the time I'm done this
project)as a substitute for OIDs until there are 64-bit OIDs? 

Either way, are 64-bit OIDs planned within the next couple years?  I could only find discussion on this from 2000, and
theannouncement that OIDs were optional after a certain version. 

Thanks,
Kev

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