Re: WIP: extensible enums

On 24 October 2010 05:26, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Well, the easy way to read a consistent view of the world is to load the
> cache using an MVCC snapshot instead of SnapshotNow.  The current code
> structure isn't amenable to that because it's relying on a syscache to
> fetch the data for it, but that seems pretty inefficient anyway.  I'm
> thinking of changing it around so that the enum cache gets loaded with
> a regular systable_beginscan() scan, and then we could load with an
> MVCC snapshot.
>
> I'm kind of inclined to go to the float-based representation anyway,
> though, just because not having to update other rows to do an insert
> seems like a good thing.  But we could combine that with an MVCC
> snapshot on the read side, which would make renumbering safe, which
> would mean that we could auto-renumber when we ran out of code space
> and not otherwise.  Is that getting too complicated?
>

As an alternative, how about storing the sort order as an array of
OIDs, in a single row in pg_type, or a new table, rather than across
multiple rows in pg_enum.

Code that read it would be guaranteed a consistent view of the data,
and at worst, it might be missing recently added elements, which the
comparison code can already deal with by re-reading the array.

Regards,
Dean

>                        regards, tom lane
>