The catalog pg_am stores information about relation access methods. There is one row for each access method supported by the system. Currently, only tables and indexes have access methods. The requirements for table and index access methods are discussed in detail in Chapter 61 and Chapter 62 respectively.
Table 51.3. pg_am Columns
Column Type Description |
---|
Row identifier |
Name of the access method |
OID of a handler function that is responsible for supplying information about the access method |
|
Before PostgreSQL™ 9.6, pg_am
contained many additional columns representing properties of index access
methods. That data is now only directly visible at the C code level.
However, pg_index_column_has_property()
and related
functions have been added to allow SQL queries to inspect index access
method properties; see Table 9.74.