RelFileNumbers are now assigned using a separate counter, instead of
being assigned from the OID counter. This counter never wraps around:
if all 2^56 possible RelFileNumbers are used, an internal error
occurs. As the cluster is limited to 2^64 total bytes of WAL, this
limitation should not cause a problem in practice.
If the counter were 64 bits wide rather than 56 bits wide, we would
need to increase the width of the BufferTag, which might adversely
impact buffer lookup performance. Also, this lets us use bigint for
pg_class.relfilenode and other places where these values are exposed
at the SQL level without worrying about overflow.
This should remove the need to keep "tombstone" files around until
the next checkpoint when relations are removed. We do that to keep
RelFileNumbers from being recycled, but now that won't happen
anyway. However, this patch doesn't actually change anything in
this area; it just makes it possible for a future patch to do so.
Dilip Kumar, based on an idea from Andres Freund, who also reviewed
some earlier versions of the patch. Further review and some
wordsmithing by me. Also reviewed at various points by Ashutosh
Sharma, Vignesh C, Amul Sul, Álvaro Herrera, and Tom Lane.
Discussion: http://postgr.es/m/CA+Tgmobp7+7kmi4gkq7Y+4AM9fTvL+O1oQ4-5gFTT+6Ng-dQ=g@mail.gmail.com
The PostgreSQL contrib tree
---------------------------
This subtree contains porting tools, analysis utilities, and plug-in
features that are not part of the core PostgreSQL system, mainly
because they address a limited audience or are too experimental to be
part of the main source tree. This does not preclude their
usefulness.
User documentation for each module appears in the main SGML
documentation.
When building from the source distribution, these modules are not
built automatically, unless you build the "world" target. You can
also build and install them all by running "make all" and "make
install" in this directory; or to build and install just one selected
module, do the same in that module's subdirectory.
Some directories supply new user-defined functions, operators, or
types. To make use of one of these modules, after you have installed
the code you need to register the new SQL objects in the database
system by executing a CREATE EXTENSION command. In a fresh database,
you can simply do
CREATE EXTENSION module_name;
See the PostgreSQL documentation for more information about this
procedure.