Re: Modifying TOAST thresholds

Tom, are you going to do this for 8.3?

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Tom Lane wrote:
> In another thread I wrote:
> > ... One thing I was just thinking about is that it's silly to have
> > the threshold constrained so strongly by a desire that tuples in toast
> > tables not be toastable.  It would be trivial to tweak the heapam.c
> > routines so that they simply don't invoke the toaster when relkind is
> > 't', and then we could have independent choices of toast-tuple size and
> > main-tuple size.  This would be particularly good because in the current
> > scheme you can't modify toast-tuple size without an initdb, but if that
> > were decoupled there'd be no reason not to allow changes in the
> > main-tuple thresholds.
> 
> After thinking about this more I'm convinced that the above is a good
> idea, eg in heap_insert change
> 
>     if (HeapTupleHasExternal(tup) || tup->t_len > TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD)
>         heaptup = toast_insert_or_update(relation, tup, NULL, use_wal);
>     else
>         heaptup = tup;
> 
> to
> 
>     if (relation->rd_rel->relkind == RELKIND_TOASTVALUE)
>     {
>         /* toast table entries should never be recursively toasted */
>         Assert(!HeapTupleHasExternal(tup));
>         heaptup = tup;
>     }
>     else if (HeapTupleHasExternal(tup) || tup->t_len > TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD)
>         heaptup = toast_insert_or_update(relation, tup, NULL, use_wal);
>     else
>         heaptup = tup;
> 
> I also think that we ought to add TOAST_MAX_CHUNK_SIZE to the set of
> compiled-in parameters that are recorded in pg_control and checked for
> compatibility at startup (like BLCKSZ) --- this will prevent anyone from
> shooting themselves in the foot while experimenting.
> 
> Any objections?
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
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