Re: [HACKERS] Full page writes improvement, code update

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

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: "Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com>
Cc: "Zeugswetter Andreas ADI SD" <ZeugswetterA@spardat.at>, "Koichi Suzuki" <suzuki.koichi@oss.ntt.co.jp>, "Hannu Krosing" <hannu@skype.net>, "Joshua D. Drake" <jd@commandprompt.com>, josh@agliodbs.com, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org, pgsql-patches@postgresql.org
Date: 2007-04-13T16:50:33Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
"Simon Riggs" <simon@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> Writing lots of additional code simply to remove a parameter that
> *might* be mis-interpreted doesn't sound useful to me, especially when
> bugs may leak in that way. My take is that this is simple and useful
> *and* we have it now; other ways don't yet exist, nor will they in time
> for 8.3.

The potential for misusing the switch is only one small part of the
argument; the larger part is that this has been done in the wrong way
and will cost performance unnecessarily.  The fact that it's ready
now is not something that I think should drive our choices.

I believe that it would be possible to make the needed core-server
changes in time for 8.3, and then to work on compress/decompress
on its own time scale and publish it on pgfoundry; with the hope
that it would be merged to contrib or core in 8.4.  Frankly the
compress/decompress code needs work anyway before it could be
merged (eg, I noted a distinct lack of I/O error checking).

			regards, tom lane