Thread: Postgres 7.1 and the 8k tuple / row limit

Postgres 7.1 and the 8k tuple / row limit

From
"Ally"
Date:
Hey all,

I've developed a full-text, news article database in Postgres with Perl and
the Pg module as my search front end. The only problem (that I discovered
AFTER I'd done all my dev work) is that Postgres has an 8K row limit. About
3% of my articles exceed this size limit.

I've tried splitting the articles into three separate rows (which are then
joined with '||' when performing a query) but this is far too slow without
cluster indexing.

Recompiling Postgres with a larger row size limit is not an option and
anyway, the decision is not mine.

However, I've read that Postgres 7.1 / 7.2 will accomodate larger row sizes
and was wondering if there was a ballpark ETA / release date for them. And
does anybody know which version will have this feature?

The reason I ask is that I might hang around waiting for these releases
rather than stick with my current plan of cutting my losses and switching to
DB2.

Cheers.

Ally

ally@nospam.netspace.net.au

PS: Remove 'nospam' from e-mail address to reply.

Re: Postgres 7.1 and the 8k tuple / row limit

From
Neil Conway
Date:
On Sun, Oct 08, 2000 at 01:17:45PM +1000, Ally wrote:
> I've developed a full-text, news article database in Postgres with Perl and
> the Pg module as my search front end. The only problem (that I discovered
> AFTER I'd done all my dev work) is that Postgres has an 8K row limit. About
> 3% of my articles exceed this size limit.
>
> However, I've read that Postgres 7.1 / 7.2 will accomodate larger row sizes
> and was wondering if there was a ballpark ETA / release date for them. And
> does anybody know which version will have this feature?

It will be in 7.1, which introduces TOAST (basically, support for
long tuples). It's also in the current CVS sources. I really have no
idea when the official release date is, but I'm guessing a beta
sometime in October, and a release in November? But that's a guess
from a PgSQL user, not developer - I'd recommend waiting for a
developer to get back to you.

IMHO, you have 2 choices. Use Large Objects, or wait for TOAST. I'm
writing a similar application to yours, and I've decided to use
TOAST and do my development on a pre-7.1 snapshot copy. It's very
stable (for a development snapshot - I haven't been running it in
production), and a number of annoying bugs have been fixed. I haven't
had any problems at all.

HTH,

Neil

--
Neil Conway <neilconway@home.com>
Get my GnuPG key from: http://klamath.dyndns.org/mykey.asc
Encrypted mail welcomed

I disapprove of what you say, but will defend to the death your right
to say it.
        -- Voltaire

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Re: Postgres 7.1 and the 8k tuple / row limit

From
Tom Lane
Date:
"Ally" <ally@nospam.netspace.net.au> writes:
> However, I've read that Postgres 7.1 / 7.2 will accomodate larger row sizes
> and was wondering if there was a ballpark ETA / release date for them. And
> does anybody know which version will have this feature?

7.1 for sure; the feature has been working in development sources for
months.

7.1 release date is not set yet, but you could reasonably do development
work with a current snapshot.  Wouldn't want to trust a snapshot with
mission-critical data, but for devel work it's plenty solid enough.

            regards, tom lane

Re: Postgres 7.1 and the 8k tuple / row limit

From
Douglas
Date:
Where can I download the 7.1 snapshot?
Thanks
Douglas

On 9 Oct 2000 23:46:29 -0400, tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us (Tom Lane) wroth:

>"Ally" <ally@nospam.netspace.net.au> writes:
>> However, I've read that Postgres 7.1 / 7.2 will accomodate larger row sizes
>> and was wondering if there was a ballpark ETA / release date for them. And
>> does anybody know which version will have this feature?
>
>7.1 for sure; the feature has been working in development sources for
>months.
>
>7.1 release date is not set yet, but you could reasonably do development
>work with a current snapshot.  Wouldn't want to trust a snapshot with
>mission-critical data, but for devel work it's plenty solid enough.
>
>            regards, tom lane