Re: Thanks, naming conventions, and count()

I could even see a utility that does a dump of this info into a flat file,
entirely overwriting the file every time.

This would be quick to reference and usable in a meltdown scenario. Could
easily be incorporated into vacuum and other db maintenance cron scripts.

-Casey


Bruce Momjian wrote:

>>> Yes, I like that idea, but the problem is that it is hard to update just
>>> one table in the file.  You sort of have to update the entire file each
>>> time a table changes.  That is why I liked symlinks because they are
>>> per-table, but you are right that the symlink creation could fail
>>> because the new table file was never created or something, leaving the
>>> symlink pointing to nothing.  Not sure how to address this.  Is there a
>>> way to update a flat file when a single table changes?
>> 
>> Why not just dump the whole file?  That way, if a previosu dump failed for
>> whatever reason, the new dump would correct that omission ...
> 
> 
> Yes, you can do that, but it is only updated during a dump, right? 
> Makes it hard to use during the day, no?
> 
> 
>> Then again, why not some sort of 'lsdb' command that looks at where it is
>> and gives you info as appropriate?
> 
> 
> 
> I want to do that for oid2name.  I had the plan layed out, but never got
> to it.
> 
> 
>> if in data/base, then do a connect to template1 using postgres so that you
>> can dump and parse the raw data from pg_database ... if in a directory,
>> you should be able to connect to that database in a similar way to grab
>> the contents of pg_class ...
>> 
>> no server would need to be running for this to work, and if it was
>> readonly, it should be workable if a server is running, no?
> 
> 
> I think parsing the file contents is too hard.  The database would have
> to be running and I would use psql.