Hi hackers,
As of now we don't have any built-in way to extract the block and offset components from a TID. When people need to group by page (like for bloat analysis) or filter by specific blocks, they usually end up using the `ctid::text::point` hack:
SELECT (ctid::text::point)[0]::bigint AS blockno,
(ctid::text::point)[1]::int AS offset
FROM my_table;
This works, but it's pretty clunky, relies on the text representation, and isn't great if you're trying to parse TIDs outside of SQL.
The attached patch adds two simple accessor functions:
- `tid_blockno(tid) -> bigint`
- `tid_offset(tid) -> integer`
A couple of quick notes on the implementation I went for:
- `tid_blockno` returns `int8` since `BlockNumber` is `uint32` and could overflow `int4`.
- `tid_offset` returns `int4` since `OffsetNumber` is `uint16`.
- Both are marked leakproof and strict.
- I used the `NoCheck` macros from `itemptr.h` so they safely handle user-supplied literals like `(0,0)`.
Please let me know what you think!
Regards,
Ayush
