Hello dear -hackers,
I'm maintaining pg_reorg/pg_repack, which you may know effectively
allow online VACUUM FULL or CLUSTER. It works by installing logging
triggers to keep data up-to-date during the migration, creating a copy
of the table, and eventually swapping the tables relfilenodes.
The new table is forced to keep exactly the same physical structure,
e.g. restoring dropped columns too. Failing to do so was apparently a
big mistake, looking at this commit [1]. My knowledge of Postgres at
that level is limited: what I imagine is that cached plans keep the
offset of the field in the row, so data ends up read/written in the
wrong position if such offset changes. The commit message mentions
views and stored procedures being affected.
Is there a way to force invalidation of all the cache that may hold a
reference to the columns offset? Or is the problem an entirely
different one and the above cache invalidation wouldn't be enough?
If we managed to allow schema change in pg_repack we could allow many
more online manipulations features: changing data types, reordering
columns, really dropping columns freeing up space etc.
Thank you very much,
-- Daniele
[1] https://github.com/reorg/pg_repack/commit/960930b645df8eeeda15f176c95d3e450786f78a