"Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
> Exactly what will these allow that you can't do with inspection of ctid
> etc? (I suspect your answer will be "can't see infomask"
For testing the packed varlena stuff it would have been handy to be able to
see the length of tuples on disk. I made do with pg_column_size(foo.*) but
it's not exactly the same thing I don't think.
And I could see for debugging HOT and vacuum it would be helpful to see the
physical layout of the tuples in the page. Ie, the offsets of each tuple
(which Simon's function didn't actually output last I saw, but would be nice
if it were added).
--
Gregory Stark
EnterpriseDB http://www.enterprisedb.com