Our usual practice for "poor man's enum" catalog columns is to define
macros for the possible values and use those, not literal constants,
in C code. But for some reason lost in the mists of time, this was
never done for typalign/attalign or typstorage/attstorage. It's never
too late to make it better though, so let's do that.
The reason I got interested in this right now is the need to duplicate
some uses of the TYPSTORAGE constants in an upcoming ALTER TYPE patch.
But in general, this sort of change aids greppability and readability,
so it's a good idea even without any specific motivation.
I may have missed a few places that could be converted, and it's even
more likely that pending patches will re-introduce some hard-coded
references. But that's not fatal --- there's no expectation that
we'd actually change any of these values. We can clean up stragglers
over time.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/16457.1583189537@sss.pgh.pa.us
Instead of always calling heap_fetch_toast_slice during detoasting,
invoke a table AM callback which, when the toast table is a heap
table, will be heap_fetch_toast_slice.
This makes it possible for a table AM other than heap to be used
as a TOAST table. It also completes the series of commits intended
to improve the interaction of tableam with TOAST that began with
commit 8b94dab06617ef80a0901ab103ebd8754427ef5a; detoast.c is
now, hopefully, fully AM-independent.
Patch by me, reviewed by Andres Freund and Peter Eisentraut.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZv-=2iWM4jcw5ZhJeL18HF96+W1yJeYrnGMYdkFFnEpQ@mail.gmail.com
The old names for the attribute-detoasting functions names included
the word "heap," which seems outdated now that the heap is only one of
potentially many table access methods.
On the other hand, toast_insert_or_update and toast_delete are
heap-specific, so rename them by adding "heap_" as a prefix.
Not all of the work of making the TOAST system fully accessible to AMs
other than the heap is done yet, but there seems to be little harm in
getting this renaming out of the way now. Commit
8b94dab066 already divided up the
functions among various files partially according to whether it was
intended that they should be heap-specific or AM-agnostic, so this is
just clarifying the division contemplated by that commit.
Patch by me, reviewed and tested by Prabhat Sabu, Thomas Munro,
Andres Freund, and Álvaro Herrera.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZv-=2iWM4jcw5ZhJeL18HF96+W1yJeYrnGMYdkFFnEpQ@mail.gmail.com
This moves much of the non-heap-specific logic from toast_delete and
toast_insert_or_update into a helper functions accessible via a new
header, toast_helper.h. Using the functions in this module, a table
AM can implement creation and deletion of TOAST table rows with
much less code duplication than was possible heretofore. Some
table AMs won't want to use the TOAST logic at all, but for those
that do this will make that easier.
Patch by me, reviewed and tested by Prabhat Sabu, Thomas Munro,
Andres Freund, and Álvaro Herrera.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZv-=2iWM4jcw5ZhJeL18HF96+W1yJeYrnGMYdkFFnEpQ@mail.gmail.com
detoast.c/h contain functions required to detoast a datum, partially
or completely, plus a few other utility functions for examining the
size of toasted datums.
toast_internals.c/h contain functions that are used internally to the
TOAST subsystem but which (mostly) do not need to be accessed from
outside.
heaptoast.c/h contains code that is intrinsically specific to the
heap AM, either because it operates on HeapTuples or is based on the
layout of a heap page.
detoast.c and toast_internals.c are placed in
src/backend/access/common rather than src/backend/access/heap. At
present, both files still have dependencies on the heap, but that will
be improved in a future commit.
Patch by me, reviewed and tested by Prabhat Sabu, Thomas Munro,
Andres Freund, and Álvaro Herrera.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+TgmoZv-=2iWM4jcw5ZhJeL18HF96+W1yJeYrnGMYdkFFnEpQ@mail.gmail.com