On Wed, Nov 8, 2023 at 6:04 AM Stephen Frost <sfr...@snowman.net> wrote: > In conversations with folks (my memory specifically is a discussion with > Peter G, added to CC, and my apologies to Peter if I'm misremembering) > there was a pretty strong push that a page should be able to 'stand > alone' and not depend on something else (eg: pg_control, or whatever) to > provide info needed be able to interpret the page. For my part, I don't > have a particularly strong feeling on that, but that's what lead to this > design.
The term that I have used in the past is "self-contained". Meaning capable of being decoded more or less as-is, without any metadata, by tools like pg_filedump. Any design in this area should try to make things as easy to debug as possible, for the obvious reason: encrypted data that somehow becomes corrupt is bound to be a nightmare to debug. (Besides, we already support tools like pg_filedump, so this isn't a new principle.) -- Peter Geoghegan
