Re: Possible to go without page headers?

On 2/14/22 16:19, Tom Lane wrote:
> Chris Cleveland <ccleve+github@dieselpoint.com> writes:
>> Can I treat pages as just a flat, open 8k buffer and fill them with
>> arbitrary data?
> 
> No, at least not unless you plan to reimplement much of the WAL
> mechanism.  You do need at least an LSN in the right place.
> I kinda doubt that you can get away with ignoring checksumming,
> either.  On the whole, I think you'd be best off to use a standard
> page header; the amount you're saving by avoiding that will be
> minuscule, and the amount of work you cause for yourself probably
> not so much.
> 
> BTW, there are also tools such as pg_filedump that expect that index
> pages can be identified by some sort of magic number kept in the
> "special space" at the page tail.  You're not absolutely bound to make
> that work, but you'll be cutting yourself off from some potentially
> handy support.

You'll also get errors from external tools (like pgBackRest) that 
validate checksums and headers.

Regards,
-David