Re: Extending varlena

On Mon, 2008-08-18 at 16:22 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> David Fetter <david@fetter.org> writes:
> > What would need to happen for the next jump up from where varlena is
> > now, to 8 bytes?
> 
> Dealing with upwards-of-4GB blobs as single Datums isn't remotely sane,
> and won't become so in the near (or even medium) future.  So I don't
> see the point of doing all the work that would be involved in making
> this go.
> 
> What would make more sense is to redesign the large-object stuff to be
> somewhat modern and featureful, and provide stream-access APIs (think
> lo_read, lo_seek, etc) that allow offsets wider than 32 bits.  The main
> things I think we'd need to consider besides just the access API are
> 
> - permissions features (more than "none" anyway)
> - better management of orphaned objects (obsoleting vacuumlo)
> - support > 16TB of large objects (maybe partition pg_largeobject?)
> - dump and restore probably need improvement to be practical for such
>   large data volumes

Sounds like a good list.

Probably also using a separate Sequence to allocate numbers rather than
using up all the Oids on LOs would be a good plan.

-- Simon Riggs           www.2ndQuadrant.comPostgreSQL Training, Services and Support