Reduce the alignment requirement of type "name" from int to char, and arrange

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.

1 files changed, 4 insertions, 8 deletions

diff --git a/src/include/c.h b/src/include/c.h
index 16ccb4cf4e3..d8fa1d25d20 100644
--- a/src/include/c.h
+++ b/src/include/c.h
@@ -12,7 +12,7 @@
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1996-2008, PostgreSQL Global Development Group
  * Portions Copyright (c) 1994, Regents of the University of California
  *
- * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/c.h,v 1.227 2008/06/17 16:09:06 momjian Exp $
+ * $PostgreSQL: pgsql/src/include/c.h,v 1.228 2008/06/24 17:58:27 tgl Exp $
  *
  *-------------------------------------------------------------------------
  */
@@ -442,16 +442,12 @@ typedef struct
 } oidvector;					/* VARIABLE LENGTH STRUCT */
 
 /*
- * We want NameData to have length NAMEDATALEN and int alignment,
- * because that's how the data type 'name' is defined in pg_type.
- * Use a union to make sure the compiler agrees.  Note that NAMEDATALEN
- * must be a multiple of sizeof(int), else sizeof(NameData) will probably
- * not come out equal to NAMEDATALEN.
+ * Representation of a Name: effectively just a C string, but null-padded to
+ * exactly NAMEDATALEN bytes.  The use of a struct is historical.
  */
-typedef union nameData
+typedef struct nameData
 {
 	char		data[NAMEDATALEN];
-	int			alignmentDummy;
 } NameData;
 typedef NameData *Name;