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Date: Thu, 13 May 2010 11:26:39 -0400
Message-ID: <AANLkTimmkckBIk30MUjNKjH_h47fJ1VULeRA1OuOEJmm@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: "supplementary storage table"?
From: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: pgsql-docs@postgresql.org
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On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Okay, who decided $SUBJECT was a good locution for "toast table"?
> I find two or three usages of that in the CREATE/ALTER TABLE reference
> pages, without definition. =A0Everywhere else it's "toast table".
> We do not need people deciding to invent their own terminology for
> the docs.

Well, according to git, the first mention of it was here:

commit 43bb6b91b229ad859358c7365c941f55a74ae7e9
Author: Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us>
Date:   Tue Mar 5 05:33:31 2002 +0000

    I attach a version of my toast-slicing patch, against current CVS
    (current as of a few hours ago.)

    This patch:

    1. Adds PG_GETARG_xxx_P_SLICE() macros and associated support routines.

    2. Adds routines in src/backend/access/tuptoaster.c for fetching only
    necessary chunks of a toasted value. (Modelled on latest changes to
    assume chunks are returned in order).

    3. Amends text_substr and bytea_substr to use new methods. It now
    handles multibyte cases -and should still lead to a performance
    improvement in the multibyte case where the substring is near the
    beginning of the string.

    4. Added new command: ALTER TABLE tabname ALTER COLUMN colname SET
    STORAGE {PLAIN | EXTERNAL | EXTENDED | MAIN} to parser and documented i=
n
    alter-table.sgml. (NB I used ColId as the item type for the storage
    mode string, rather than a new production - I hope this makes sense!).
    All this does is sets attstorage for the specified column.

    4. AlterTableAlterColumnStatistics is now AlterTableAlterColumnFlags an=
d
    handles both statistics and storage (it uses the subtype code to
    distinguish). The previous version of my patch also re-arranged other
    code in backend/commands/command.c but I have dropped that from this
    patch.(I plan to return to it separately).

    5. Documented new macros (and also the PG_GETARG_xxx_P_COPY macros) in
    xfunc.sgml. ref/alter_table.sgml also contains documentation for ALTER
    COLUMN SET STORAGE.

    John Gray

--=20
Robert Haas
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