Re: FUNC_MAX_ARGS benchmarks

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: "Nigel J. Andrews" <nandrews@investsystems.co.uk>
Cc: Bruce Momjian <pgman@candle.pha.pa.us>, Joe Conway <mail@joeconway.com>, Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@fourpalms.org>, Neil Conway <nconway@klamath.dyndns.org>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Date: 2002-08-06T13:36:48Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
"Nigel J. Andrews" <nandrews@investsystems.co.uk> writes:
> I was thinking of looking at turning names to varchars/text in order to test
> the performance hit [in the first instance]. However doing a
>   find . -name \*\.\[ch\] | xargs grep NAMEDATALEN | wc -l
> gives 185 hits and some of those are setting other macros. It seems to
> me there is a fair amount of work involved in just getting variable
> length names into the system so that they can be tested.

And that is not even the tip of the iceberg.  The real reason that NAME
is fixed-length is so that it can be accessed as a member of a C
structure.  Moving NAME into the variable-length category would make it
much more painful to access than it is now, and would require
rearranging the field order in every system catalog that has a name field.

			regards, tom lane