Re: Toasted table not deleted when no out of line columns left

Hans-Jürgen Schönig <hs@cybertec.at>

From: Hans-Jürgen Schönig <hs@cybertec.at>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Zoltan Boszormenyi <zb@cybertec.at>, pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org
Date: 2008-09-21T20:02:43Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
>

*snip*

>> Judging from that, the toasted table
>> cleanup may be part of ALTER TABLE DROP COLUMN.
>
> That would only help if you were dropping the last potentially- 
> toastable
> column of a table.  And implementing it would require introducing  
> weird
> corner cases into the tuple toaster, because it might now come across
> TOAST pointers that point to a no-longer-existent table, and have to
> consider that to be a no-op instead of an error condition.
>
> 			regards, tom lane




tom,

in our test case we had a table with 10 integer columns (nothing else)  
along with a 10 gb toast table - this is why we were a little surprised.
in this case it can definitely be cleaned up.
it is clear that we definitely don't want to change columns directly  
here when a column is dropped. - however, if there is not a single  
toastable column left, we should definitely clean up.
we will compile a patch within the next days to cover this case.

	many thanks,

		hans

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