I’ve been using hstore to record various key/val pairs, but I’ve noticed it consumes a lot more disk than I would have expected.
I don’t have any hard figures to illustrate, but empirical testing has shown that if I record these pairs as traditional column based fields, I can save a significant amount of disk.
What I think I’m seeing here, is that the hstore representation needs to store the entirety of the key alongside each value.
Let’s say I have a table of 1000 records, and 900 of them have a key named ‘A_REALLY_REALLY_REALLY_LONG_KEY’, then this key will be written do disk 900 times, along with the appropriate values.
I guess there are two options open to me here.
I could transpose these values into a dedicated field
I could use shorter key names
Does hstore2 go any way to improving this situation? Some kind of enumerated key based system?
