Re: Adjusting index special storage for pg_filedump's convenience

Heikki Linnakangas wrote:

> 
> That's a clever trick, but I can't help thinking we really should have 
> an explicit field in the page header to indicate what kind of a page it 
> is. It would make life simpler for any external tools that want to peek 
> into pages, including migration utilities after a release or two. We've 
> also been talking about setting hint bits and doing some kind of retail 
> vacuuming in bgwriter with HOT. To do that, we need to identify heap 
> pages in the bgwriter. While heap pages can currently be identified by 
> the fact that they don't have a special area, it feels hackish, and we 
> might want to do something like that for index pages too in the future.
> 
> We now have a 16-bit pd_flags field in the page header. We could use a 
> few bits from that.
> 

+1

or add one extra field
    Zdenek