Hi Karl,
I'm going down this road myself. In addition to the files Tom Lane pointed out there is also some helpful documentation here:
On Wed, Jan 16, 2019 at 2:09 PM Sam Patterson <katoriasdev@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi all,I've recently started developing an extension for Postgres for which I'll need to create a new variable-length base type. The type will require a tree-like structure in order to parse sufficiently, which of course probably means having some sort of recursive data structure, like a struct that has members which are pointers to itself for child nodes. After doing some research, specifically looking at how other variable-length data types store their data, it seems almost all of them store the data in a binary representation, using bit masks and offsets etc in order to store/access the data whilst having an in-memory representation that's used to manipulate the data.I presume the purpose for using this approach is because all the data in a varlena type has to be contiguous, and the moment you start using pointers this is no longer possible. So my question is, given a structure that looks something like this,typedef struct Node{char *data;Node *left;Node *right;} Node;am I right in saying that I wouldn't be able to store that representation on-disk, but instead I'd have to transform it into some binary representation and back again when writing/reading respectively, are there any alternatives?Regards,Karl
