Re: Index on System Table - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Tom Lane
Subject Re: Index on System Table
Date
Msg-id 7802.1332353862@sss.pgh.pa.us
Whole thread Raw
In response to Re: Index on System Table  (Cody Cutrer <cody@instructure.com>)
Responses Re: Index on System Table
Re: Index on System Table
List pgsql-general
Cody Cutrer <cody@instructure.com> writes:
> On Tue, Mar 20, 2012 at 6:06 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> There's not really support for adding indexes to system catalogs
>> on-the-fly.  I think it would work (barring concurrency issues)
>> for most catalogs, but pg_class has special limitations due to
>> the "relmapping" infrastructure.  It's not something I'd particularly
>> care to try on a production database.

BTW, I experimented with that a little bit and found that the relmapper
is not really the stumbling block, at least not after applying this
one-line patch:
http://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commitdiff;h=f70f095c9096d5e2689e8d79172b37b57a84e51b

It seemed to work for me to do this:

    stop postmaster
    start a standalone backend with -c allow_system_table_mods=1
    create index pg_class_relnamespace_index on pg_class(relnamespace);
    stop standalone backend, restart postmaster

There are a lot of gotchas here, notably that the session in which you
create the index won't know it's there (so in this case, a reindex on
pg_class would likely be advisable afterwards).  I still think you'd be
nuts to try it on a production database, but ...

            regards, tom lane

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