On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 12:29 PM Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote: > > Again, I'm not 100% positive that changing the Boolean column to a > > three-valued column is the right way forward, but it does have the > > advantage of saving a byte, and the width of system catalog tables has > > been a periodic concern. > > In this case, as I already said, the new boolean column would go in > what's currently padding space, so there's no widening taking place.
IMHO, there will almost certainly be more single-byte columns at some point in the future, so I feel like using up padding space is not much different than actual widening over the long term. > Please don't think that I'm in favor of doing it the difficult way for > no reason. Previous versions of the patch (changing attnotnull to > char), from the Postgres core code perspective, were pretty much ready > -- we're having this discussion only to avoid the breakage. I could > save us a bunch of time here and just push those patches, but I think > the responsible thing here (the one we're less likely to regret) is not > to. Fair enough. I think I've said what I want to say, and I'm not here to substitute my judgement for yours. -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
