On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 7:17 PM, Peter Geoghegan <p...@heroku.com> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 30, 2014 at 3:04 PM, Peter Geoghegan <p...@heroku.com> wrote: >> I don't have a problem with changing the name. But the name that you >> propose is all about text. This patch is intended to add an extensible >> infrastructure (a new part of sort support), plus one client of that >> more complete extensible infrastructure (sort support for text). I >> think there's a good chance that it could work well for another type >> too, like numeric, if we could come up with a good system for encoding >> numeric normalized keys, and if we can similarly get over the fact >> that there is going to be a minority of cases that won't be helped at >> all. That's a whole other discussion, though, and text is clearly the >> really compelling case. >> >> Do you have another suggestion? > > How about "proxy sort keys"? It's suggestive of a format that can be > relied on to faithfully represent the original key. But, like any > proxy, it's a substitute, and by definition a substitute is never as > authoritative as the original value. As such, the original value may > need to be consulted when the proxy sort key doesn't have enough > information to give a conclusive answer, which hopefully doesn't > happen often. Like any good proxy, proxy sort keys know enough to know > when they cannot faithfully represent what the original value would > say. In practice proxy sort keys are almost always themselves > pass-by-value, while serving to proxy a pass by reference type, but > this isn't a formal requirement. Encoding strategies don't necessarily > have anything to do with strxfrm(). That's just how text's default > opclass happens to do it.
I certainly like that better than poor-man; but proxy, to me, fails to convey inexactness. Perhaps we can work that idea in somehow. Or maybe "pre"-something, to indicate that we do this before comparing the regular key, in the hopes of not needing to. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers
