I want to access part of a table on the disk sequentially, i,e., when I get to a tuple in the table, I need to read several pages of data in the table starting from this tuple. I guess CTID could be translated to physical address on the disk to retrieve this tuple, right? If so, how do I use CTID to retrieve a particular tuple (or a page) in SQL? Can I use OID to do this equally efficiently?
Another question is: when I update a tuple in a table, this tuple will get a new CTID and it leaves a gap at the old CTID, and when I insert a new tuple, it's appended to the end of the table, so the gap is always there. Does this mean it actually inserts a new tuple and the out-dated tuple still occupies the space? How can I write the updated tuple back to its original position to utilize disk space more efficiently?
