On 21.03.23 00:51, Tom Lane wrote:
Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> writes:
On 2023-03-20 10:37:36 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
I agree that attinhcount could be narrowed, but I have some concern
about attstattarget. IIRC, the limit on attstattarget was once 1000
and then we raised it to 10000. Is it inconceivable that we might
want to raise it to 100000 someday?
Hard to believe that'd happen in a minor version - and I don't think there'd
an issue with widening it again in a major version?
True. However, I think Tomas' idea of making these columns nullable
is even better than narrowing them.
The context of my message was to do the proposed change for PG16 to buy
back a few bytes that are being added by another feature, and then
consider doing a larger detangling of pg_attribute and tuple descriptors
in PG17, which might well involve taking the attstattarget out of the
hot path. Making attstattarget nullable (i.e., not part of the fixed
part of pg_attribute) would require fairly significant surgery, so I
think it would be better done as part of a more comprehensive change
that would allow the same treatment for other columns as well.
