Re: Accessing schema data in information schema

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

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Hannu Krosing <hannu@skype.net>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2006-03-22T22:29:08Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Hannu Krosing <hannu@skype.net> writes:
> hel kenal peval, K, 2006-03-22 kell 16:11, kirjutas Tom Lane:
>> Yeah.  I've occasionally toyed with the idea that sequences should be
>> rows in a single catalog instead of independent tables as they are now.
>> This would make for a much smaller disk footprint (with consequent I/O
>> savings) and would solve problems like the one you have. 

> Would it not make page locking problems much worse with all get_next()'s
> competeing to update the same page? 

Well, there'd be at most about 80 sequences per page (ballpark estimate
remembering that we'd still want to store a sequence name) and the
reduction in demand for shared buffers might outweigh the increased
contention for any one buffer.  I haven't seen any examples where get_next
is the key source of contention anyhow.  A last point is that in simple
cases where the contention is all on one sequence, you're going to have
that problem anyway.

> At least unless you reserve one page for each sequence.

Which is exactly what I don't want.  But we could imagine padding the
tuples to achieve any particular tuples/page ratio we want, if 80 proves
to be uncomfortably many.

			regards, tom lane