I forgot to say, a full rebuild will be necessary (some essential macros deep in gdk were changed). Sjoerd Mullender wrote:

Update of /cvsroot/monetdb/MonetDB4/src/modules/plain In directory sfp-cvsdas-1.v30.ch3.sourceforge.com:/tmp/cvs-serv28677/MonetDB4/src/modules/plain

Modified Files: aggr.mx ascii_io.mx bat.mx mkey.mx radix.mx xtables.mx Log Message: Changed the implementation of the offset heap for type string.

Before, the offset heap would contain values of type var_t (typically equal in size to oid), so if there are lots of entries but not that many different strings, a lot of space was wasted, since only the lower few bytes of the values in the offset heap would be used, the rest being zero.

In this version, the offset heap has a dynamic width. It starts off as a single byte value, and when the offsets become too large to fit in a single byte, the heap is upgraded to a short, then an int, and finally (if the system uses 64 bit oids) to lng.

There are tags to mark this change: before_variable_string_offset and after_variable_string_offset.

Only MonetDB* and pathfinder needed to be changes, so the tags are only added there.

-- Sjoerd Mullender