"Nigel J. Andrews" <nandrews@investsystems.co.uk> writes:
> I was thinking of looking at turning names to varchars/text in order to test
> the performance hit [in the first instance]. However doing a
> find . -name \*\.\[ch\] | xargs grep NAMEDATALEN | wc -l
> gives 185 hits and some of those are setting other macros. It seems to
> me there is a fair amount of work involved in just getting variable
> length names into the system so that they can be tested.
And that is not even the tip of the iceberg. The real reason that NAME
is fixed-length is so that it can be accessed as a member of a C
structure. Moving NAME into the variable-length category would make it
much more painful to access than it is now, and would require
rearranging the field order in every system catalog that has a name field.
regards, tom lane