Chris Cleveland <ccleve+github@dieselpoint.com> writes:
> Can I treat pages as just a flat, open 8k buffer and fill them with
> arbitrary data?
No, at least not unless you plan to reimplement much of the WAL
mechanism. You do need at least an LSN in the right place.
I kinda doubt that you can get away with ignoring checksumming,
either. On the whole, I think you'd be best off to use a standard
page header; the amount you're saving by avoiding that will be
minuscule, and the amount of work you cause for yourself probably
not so much.
BTW, there are also tools such as pg_filedump that expect that index
pages can be identified by some sort of magic number kept in the
"special space" at the page tail. You're not absolutely bound to make
that work, but you'll be cutting yourself off from some potentially
handy support.
regards, tom lane