Re: Numerical DB/Table Names

On Fri, 14 Sep 2001, Jeff Brickley wrote:

> I've just recently started working with PostgreSQL.  We have a 7.0
> insallation and everything seems to work fine.  I am embarking on
> upgrading to 7.1.3 but have run into a problem.  All of the databases
> are stored with numerical names in the /$prefix/base directory.  They
> seem to be stored as binaries so I am unable to open any files under
> that directory.  I know that in our 7.0 version of PostgreSQL all
> databases have a directory under the /$prefix/base directory that is
> labeled as the name of the database.  Inside each database directory the
> physical data is stored in files that have the same name as all the
> relationships in the database.  I can still insert and retrieve data
> from any database created on this new 7.1.3 cluster but am not
> comfortable with not being able to read the data files.
> Has anyone encountered this problem?  Thanks in advance for any help you
> can provide.

From contrib/oid2name's readme:
"With version 7.1 of PostgreSQL server,  the old naming scheme for
databases and tables (in $PGDATA/base) has changed.  The databases
are put in folders for their OID in pg_database and the tables in
that folder are named for their OIDs in pg_class."

The reason for the change was IIRC to better handle rollback of
create/drop statements.  It looks like the contrib/oid2name will
give you the #/name relationships (although it probably connects
to the database to do it)