Re: Any risk in increasing BLCKSZ to get larger tuples? - Mailing list pgsql-general

From Steve Wolfe
Subject Re: Any risk in increasing BLCKSZ to get larger tuples?
Date
Msg-id 000901c03a0b$f2015a00$50824e40@iboats.com
Whole thread Raw
In response to Any risk in increasing BLCKSZ to get larger tuples?  (Philip Hallstrom <philip@adhesivemedia.com>)
List pgsql-general
> > A trick you can use in 7.0.* to squeeze out a little more space is
> > to declare your large text fields as "lztext" --- this invokes
> > inline compression, which might get you a factor of 2 or so on typical
> > mail messages.  lztext will go away again in 7.1, since TOAST supersedes
> > it,
>
> Uh, why.  Does TOAST do automatic compression?  If people need to store
> huge blocks of text (like a DNA sequence) inline compression isn't just
> a hack to squeeze bigger text into a tuple.

  I'd guess that it's a speed issue.  Decompressing everything in the table
for every select sounds like a great waste of CPU power, to me, especially
when hard drives and RAM are cheap.  Kind of like the idea of "drivespace"
on Windows - nice idea, but it slowed things down quite a bit.

steve



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