> As the person who wrote it :) It was my understanding that PostgreSQL
> stores large objects on the filesystem outside of the database tables.
Definitely not true.
I think that was once an available option, many years ago ... but
it's not there now.
> could someone please describe the actual process,
Large objects are now stored in pg_largeobject. Each LO is broken into
chunks of a couple K apiece, and each chunk becomes a row. (Chunking
makes partial updates more efficient, since you don't have to rewrite
the entire LO.) The LO operations aren't really special, they're just a
convenient interface for insert/update/delete operations in this table.
Before 7.1, it worked the same except that each LO had its own table.
regards, tom lane
