Thread: Mail getting through? Short varlena headers
I sent two emails last night, one to -patches and one to -hackers. Neither seems to have come through. Has anyone else seen them? I sent this email once already too and it hasn't come through. I'm resending it from a different account now. On -patches I posted an updated patch that was functionally a noop but changed the macro api to SETVARSIZE(). It also replaced the VARATT_SIZE and VARATT_DATA macros with VARSIZE and VARDATA, changed inet to call detoast, and changed arrays, inet, geometric data types and a handful of others to use SET_VARSIZE instead of accessing a struct member directly. On -hackers I reposted Tom's email where he proposed two sets of bitpatterns with tradeoffs and also included an additional one that was the second of his with the 2-byte cases removed. In it I said that removing the 2-byte cases had no advantages but actually since then I've thought of one. It makes the toaster code simpler since it can just set a bit in the four-byte header just as it does now. It doesn't have to worry about converting to a 2-byte header. So I'm thinking of doing it for now at least. I still think paying 2 bytes on virtually every datum is silly even if mathematically it's only 2% space savings that's still a 2% performance penalty on sequential scans and it gains us nothing except a few lines of code saved in tuptoaster.c. Comments? -- greg
Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes: > In it I said that removing the 2-byte cases had no advantages but actually > since then I've thought of one. It makes the toaster code simpler since it can > just set a bit in the four-byte header just as it does now. It doesn't have to > worry about converting to a 2-byte header. Run that by me again? A toast pointer datum ought to have a 1-byte header, since its only twenty-something bytes long. regards, tom lane
"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes: > Gregory Stark <gsstark@mit.edu> writes: >> In it I said that removing the 2-byte cases had no advantages but actually >> since then I've thought of one. It makes the toaster code simpler since it can >> just set a bit in the four-byte header just as it does now. It doesn't have to >> worry about converting to a 2-byte header. > > Run that by me again? A toast pointer datum ought to have a 1-byte > header, since its only twenty-something bytes long. I was referring to compressed inline data. By not having inline compressed data be 2-byte headers it eliminates having to check a lot of corner cases and reduces the changes in tuptoaster.c since it means pg_lzcompress can return a normal 4-byte header and nobody has to convert it to a 2-byte header. So I am doing that for now. I suspect we'll never get around to reintroducing 2-byte headers, but we could if we wanted to. It would be a small change everywhere else but an annoying bunch of fiddly changes in tuptoaster.c. -- Gregory Stark EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com