On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 11:46 AM, Alvaro Herrera <alvherre@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote: > Michael Paquier wrote: >> Well, the idea is really to get rid of that as there are already >> facilities of this kind for CREATE TABLE LIKE in the parser and ALTER >> TABLE when rewriting a relation. It is not really attractive to have a >> 3rd method in the backend code to do the same kind of things, for a >> method that is even harder to maintain than the other two. > > I dislike the backend code that uses SPI and manufacturing node to > re-creates indexes. IMO we should get rid of it. Let's not call it > "facilities", but rather "grotty hacks".
Aha. You are making my day here ;) > I think before suggesting to add even more code to perpetuate that idea, > we should think about going in the other direction. I have not tried to > write the code, but it should be possible to have an intermediate > function called by ProcessUtility* which transforms the IndexStmt into > an internal representation, then calls DefineIndex. This way, all this > code that wants to create indexes for backend-internal reasons can > create the internal representation directly then call DefineIndex, > instead of the horrible hacks they use today creating parse nodes by > hand.
Yeah, that would be likely possible. I am not volunteering for that in the short term though..
It sounds like that'd make some of ALTER TABLE a bit less ... upsetting ... too.