Martijn van Oosterhout <kleptog@svana.org> writes:
> On Sat, Mar 04, 2006 at 12:15:46PM +0200, Hannu Krosing wrote:
>> Also getting rid of toast index and start using ctids directly would be
>> a big bonus.
>> When using direct ctids we could use either ctid chains or some sort of
>> skiplist for access to N-th TOAST chunk.
> I suppose this would mean that you couldn't use vacuum on the toast
> table anymore.
Another problem with it is that it'd destroy the current optimizations
that allow partial fetches of uncompressed TOASTed fields to be fast.
You couldn't fetch page N of a TOAST datum without reading all the pages
before it.
I suppose the objection that toast tables wouldn't be regular tables
anymore might not be fatal, but you'll certainly get some pushback if
you try to take away the direct-access optimizations.
regards, tom lane