On Tue, Mar 1, 2016 at 10:52 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Aleksander Alekseev <a.alekseev@postgrespro.ru> writes:
>> There are applications that create and delete a lot of temporary
>> tables. Currently PostgreSQL doesn't handle such a use case well.
>
> True.
>
>> Fast temporary tables work almost as usual temporary tables but they
>> are not present in the catalog. Information about tables is stored in
>> shared memory instead. This way we solve a bloating problem.
>
> I think you have no concept how invasive that would be. Tables not
> represented in the catalogs would be a disaster, because *every single
> part of the backend* would have to be modified to deal with them as
> a distinct code path --- parser, planner, executor, loads and loads
> of utility commands, etc. I do not think we'd accept that. Worse yet,
> you'd also break client-side code that expects to see temp tables in
> the catalogs (consider psql \d, for example).
>
> I think a workable solution to this will still involve catalog entries,
> though maybe they could be "virtual" somehow.
Yeah, I have a really hard time believing this can ever work. There
are MANY catalog tables potentially involved here - pg_class,
pg_attribute, pg_attrdef, pg_description, pg_trigger, ... and loads
more - and they all can have OID references to each other. If you
create a bunch of fake relcache and syscache entries, you're going to
need to give them OIDs, but where will those OIDs come from? What
guarantees that they aren't in use, or won't be used later while your
temporary object still exists? I think making this work would make
parallel query look like a minor feature.
--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company
