I have a question about trying to keep memory from growing too much in a C aggregate function with pass-by-reference types. I am trying to keep track of a last-seen value in my aggregate state, so I have code roughly doing this:
Datum current;
MemoryContext aggContext;
AggCheckCallContext(fcinfo, &aggContext);
old = MemoryContextSwitchTo(aggContext);
if (!PG_ARGISNULL(0)) {
current = PG_GETARG_DATUM(0);
state->last = datumCopy(¤t, typbyval, typlen);
}
MemoryContextSwitchTo(old);
I’m essentially doing a datumCopy() on every non-null input value. I was wondering if there is a way to free the previously copied datum, since I don’t really need it anymore? Something like
if (!PG_ARGISNULL(0)) {
current = PG_GETARG_DATUM(0);
if (state->last != NULL) {
pfree(state->last);
}
state->last = datumCopy(¤t, typbyval, typlen);
}
I wasn’t sure it was allowed to call pfree() like this. My actual function is dealing with array input values, and for large sets of inputs I didn’t want to grow memory use as large as the entire data set being aggregated.
Kind regards,
Matt