Re: [PATCHES] Post-special page storage TDE support - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 8:04 AM Stephen Frost <sfrost@snowman.net> wrote:

* Andres Freund (andres@anarazel.de) wrote:
> On 2023-05-09 17:08:26 -0500, David Christensen wrote:
> > From 965309ea3517fa734c4bc89c144e2031cdf6c0c3 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
> > From: David Christensen <david@pgguru.net>
> > Date: Tue, 9 May 2023 16:56:15 -0500
> > Subject: [PATCH v4 1/3] Add reserved_page_space to Page structure
> >
> > This space is reserved for extended data on the Page structure which will be ultimately used for
> > encrypted data, extended checksums, and potentially other things.  This data appears at the end of
> > the Page, after any `pd_special` area, and will be calculated at runtime based on specific
> > ControlFile features.
> >
> > No effort is made to ensure this is backwards-compatible with existing clusters for `pg_upgrade`, as
> > we will require logical replication to move data into a cluster with
> > different settings here.
>
> The first part of the last paragraph makes it sound like pg_upgrade won't be
> supported across this commit, rather than just between different settings...

Yeah, that's vague, but you picked up on what I meant.

 

> I think as a whole this is not an insane idea. A few comments:

Thanks for all the feedback!

> - Why is it worth sacrificing space on every page to indicate which features
>   were enabled?  I think there'd need to be some convincing reasons for
>   introducing such overhead.

In conversations with folks (my memory specifically is a discussion with
Peter G, added to CC, and my apologies to Peter if I'm misremembering)
there was a pretty strong push that a page should be able to 'stand
alone' and not depend on something else (eg: pg_control, or whatever) to
provide info needed be able to interpret the page.  For my part, I don't
have a particularly strong feeling on that, but that's what lead to this
design.

Unsurprisingly, I agree that it's useful to keep these features on the page itself; from a forensic standpoint this seems much easier to interpret what is happening here, as well it would allow you to have different features on a given page or type of page depending on need.  The initial patch utilizes pg_control to store the cluster page features, but there's no reason it couldn't be dependent on fork/page type or stored in pg_tablespace to utilize different features.