On Jan 31, 2012, at 10:58 AM, Alvaro Herrera wrote:
>> I think it's butt-ugly, but it's only slightly uglier than
>> relfrozenxid which we're already stuck with. The slight amount of
>> additional ugliness is that you're going to use an XID column to store
>> a uint4 that is not an XID - but I don't have a great idea how to fix
>> that. You could mislabel it as an OID or a (signed) int4, but I'm not
>> sure that either of those is any better. We could also create an mxid
>> data type, but that seems like it might be overkill.
>
> Well, we're already storing a multixact in Xmax, so it's not like we
> don't assume that we can store multis in space normally reserved for
> Xids. What I've been wondering is not how ugly it is, but rather of the
> fact that we're bloating pg_class some more.
FWIW, users have been known to request uint datatypes; so if this really is a uint perhaps we should just create a uint
datatype...
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect jim@nasby.net
512.569.9461 (cell) http://jim.nasby.net