Re: skip WAL on COPY patch

Excerpts from Robert Haas's message of mar ago 23 17:08:50 -0300 2011:

> What I think would be really interesting is a way to make this work
> when the table *isn't* empty.  In other words, have a COPY option that
> (1) takes an exclusive lock on the table, (2) writes the data being
> inserted into new pages beyond the old EOF, and (3) arranges for crash
> recovery or transaction abort to truncate the table back to its
> previous length.  Then you could do fast bulk loads even into a table
> that's already populated, so long as you don't mind that the table
> will be excusive-locked and freespace within existing heap pages won't
> be reused.

It seems to me this would be relatively simple if we allowed segments
that are not a full GB in length.  That way, COPY could write into a
whole segment and "attach" it to the table at commit time (say, by
renaming).

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Álvaro Herrera <alvherre@commandprompt.com>
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