Thread: "supplementary storage table"?

Okay, who decided $SUBJECT was a good locution for "toast table"?
I find two or three usages of that in the CREATE/ALTER TABLE reference
pages, without definition.  Everywhere else it's "toast table".
We do not need people deciding to invent their own terminology for
the docs.

            regards, tom lane

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Okay, who decided $SUBJECT was a good locution for "toast table"?
> I find two or three usages of that in the CREATE/ALTER TABLE reference
> pages, without definition.  Everywhere else it's "toast table".
> We do not need people deciding to invent their own terminology for
> the docs.

Well, according to git, the first mention of it was here:

commit 43bb6b91b229ad859358c7365c941f55a74ae7e9
Author: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Date:   Tue Mar 5 05:33:31 2002 +0000

    I attach a version of my toast-slicing patch, against current CVS
    (current as of a few hours ago.)

    This patch:

    1. Adds PG_GETARG_xxx_P_SLICE() macros and associated support routines.

    2. Adds routines in src/backend/access/tuptoaster.c for fetching only
    necessary chunks of a toasted value. (Modelled on latest changes to
    assume chunks are returned in order).

    3. Amends text_substr and bytea_substr to use new methods. It now
    handles multibyte cases -and should still lead to a performance
    improvement in the multibyte case where the substring is near the
    beginning of the string.

    4. Added new command: ALTER TABLE tabname ALTER COLUMN colname SET
    STORAGE {PLAIN | EXTERNAL | EXTENDED | MAIN} to parser and documented in
    alter-table.sgml. (NB I used ColId as the item type for the storage
    mode string, rather than a new production - I hope this makes sense!).
    All this does is sets attstorage for the specified column.

    4. AlterTableAlterColumnStatistics is now AlterTableAlterColumnFlags and
    handles both statistics and storage (it uses the subtype code to
    distinguish). The previous version of my patch also re-arranged other
    code in backend/commands/command.c but I have dropped that from this
    patch.(I plan to return to it separately).

    5. Documented new macros (and also the PG_GETARG_xxx_P_COPY macros) in
    xfunc.sgml. ref/alter_table.sgml also contains documentation for ALTER
    COLUMN SET STORAGE.

    John Gray

--
Robert Haas
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
The Enterprise Postgres Company

Excerpts from Tom Lane's message of jue may 13 11:08:23 -0400 2010:
> Okay, who decided $SUBJECT was a good locution for "toast table"?
> I find two or three usages of that in the CREATE/ALTER TABLE reference
> pages, without definition.  Everywhere else it's "toast table".
> We do not need people deciding to invent their own terminology for
> the docs.

I think I used it somewhere, assuming the original wording I saw already
on the docs was accepted terminology.
--

Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> writes:
> Excerpts from Tom Lane's message of jue may 13 11:08:23 -0400 2010:
>> Okay, who decided $SUBJECT was a good locution for "toast table"?
>> I find two or three usages of that in the CREATE/ALTER TABLE reference
>> pages, without definition.  Everywhere else it's "toast table".
>> We do not need people deciding to invent their own terminology for
>> the docs.

> I think I used it somewhere, assuming the original wording I saw already
> on the docs was accepted terminology.

Given that we've institutionalized "toast" to the point of using it in
parameter names, I think using some other terminology is pretty silly.

            regards, tom lane