Allowing extensions to find out the OIDs of their member objects - Mailing list pgsql-hackers

In [1] I propose that we should allow extensions to get their hands
on the ability to transform function calls as per "protransform" and
to generate lossy index quals based on items in WHERE clauses.  The
APIs to give an extension control at the right points seem pretty
straightforward, but there's a problem standing in the way of actually
doing anything useful once you've got control.  In order to either
analyze a passed-in clause or generate a new one, the extension will
need to know the OIDs of the functions/operators it's working with.
And extension objects don't have fixed OIDs.

In principle this could be dealt with by looking up said OIDs from
the catalogs, but that's (1) complicated, (2) slow, (3) prone to
possibly-security-sensitive mistakes such as omitting a schema
specification, and (4) at risk of getting broken entirely by
user-accessible changes such as ALTER FUNCTION RENAME.  Point (2) can
be alleviated by caching, but that just makes (1) even worse, plus
there are lots of ways to do caching wrong.

I thought about extending the extension infrastructure to provide
some way of retrieving relevant OIDs.  We could imagine, for instance,
that an extension script has a way to say "this function is object
number three within this extension", and while running the script
we make a catalog entry showing that object number three has OID
thus-and-so, and then that catalog entry can be consulted to get
the right OID (by C code that has hard-wired knowledge that object
number three is the function it cares about).  This is still kind
of messy, because aside from the hand-assigned object numbers
you'd have to use the extension name as part of the lookup key,
making the name into something the C code critically depends on.
We don't have ALTER EXTENSION RENAME, so maybe that's okay, but
it seems painful to say that we can never have it.

In the end it seems like possibly the cleanest answer is to change
things so that extensions *can* have fixed OIDs that their C code can
know, eliminating lookup costs and allowing coding conventions for this
sort of work to be the same as in the core backend.  We could raise
FirstNormalObjectId to create some unused OID space that we could then
assign chunks of to specific extensions on-request.  This is problematic
for relations, types, and roles, because pg_upgrade wants to preserve
OIDs of those objects across upgrades, so we could not ensure that the
"unused" space is free of such objects.  But it would work for all
other object types, and I think that it might well be sufficient if
an extension can have fixed OIDs for its functions, operators, and
opfamilies/opclasses.  (At need, it could find out the OID for one of
its types by looking up the argument or result types for one of its
functions.)

There are various places in pg_upgrade and postgres_fdw that
assume more than they perhaps should about the significance of
FirstNormalObjectId, but I think that that could be dealt with.

A larger issue is whether "hand out some OIDs on-demand" is a
sustainable strategy.  I think that it is, if we encourage extensions
to assign fixed OIDs only to objects they really need to.  In thirty-ish
years of core PG development, we've only used up ~4200 fixed OIDs,
and a lot of those are for functions that probably don't really need
fixed OIDs but got one because we give one to every built-in function.
However, if there's a big land rush to claim large chunks of OIDs,
we might have a problem.

We'd have to invent some SQL syntax whereby extension scripts can
actually apply their assigned OIDs to their objects.  I'm not very
enthused about adding an "OID nnn" option to every type of CREATE
command that might need this.  A quick-and-dirty answer is to create
support functions similar to binary_upgrade_set_next_pg_type_oid()
that set the OID to give to the next-created object of each category
we need to support.

There are various issues and bits of work around this, but the only one
that I've thought of that I haven't got an answer for is "how should
an extension upgrade script assign a fixed OID to an object that already
existed in the previous extension version, but without a fixed OID?".
We can't just change the recorded OID because that'll break
dependencies, view references, etc.  Conceivably we could write code
that runs through the catalogs and changes all references, but man
that'd be a mess.  Anyone have another idea?

Another question is whether you need any special permissions to assign
a fixed OID in this way.  The most conservative answer is to require
superuserness, which might be enough because the plausible use-cases
for fixed OIDs involve C code, which you'd need to be superuser to
install anyhow.  But it seems overkill somehow.  OTOH, it would be
annoying if a random user could eat up a "reserved" OID that later
prevented someone from installing an extension they wanted.

Thoughts?

            regards, tom lane

[1] https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/15193.1548028093@sss.pgh.pa.us