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    Reduce the alignment requirement of type "name" from int to char, and arrange · 5f6f840e
    Tom Lane 提交于
    to suppress zero-padding of "name" entries in indexes.
    
    The alignment change is unlikely to save any space, but it is really needed
    anyway to make the world safe for our widespread practice of passing plain
    old C strings to functions that are declared as taking Name.  In the previous
    coding, the C compiler was entitled to assume that a Name pointer was
    word-aligned; but we were failing to guarantee that.  I think the reason
    we'd not seen failures is that usually the only thing that gets done with
    such a pointer is strcmp(), which is hard to optimize in a way that exploits
    word-alignment.  Still, some enterprising compiler guy will probably think
    of a way eventually, or we might change our code in a way that exposes
    more-obvious optimization opportunities.
    
    The padding change is accomplished in one-liner fashion by declaring the
    "name" index opclasses to use storage type "cstring" in pg_opclass.h.
    Normally btree and hash don't allow a nondefault storage type, because they
    don't have any provisions for converting the input datum to another type.
    However, because name and cstring are effectively the same thing except for
    padding, no conversion is needed --- we only need index_form_tuple() to treat
    the datum as being cstring not name, and this is sufficient.  This seems to
    make for about a one-third reduction in the typical sizes of system catalog
    indexes that involve "name" columns, of which we have many.
    
    These two changes are only weakly related, but the alignment change makes
    me feel safer that the padding change won't introduce problems, so I'm
    committing them together.
    5f6f840e
pg_config_manual.h 6.9 KB