Re: Reducing data type space usage

Gregory Stark <stark@enterprisedb.com> writes:
> Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> writes:
>> Weren't you the one that's been going on at great length about how
>> wastefully we store CHAR(1) ?  Sure, this has a somewhat restricted
>> use case, but it's about as efficient as we could possibly get within
>> that use case.

> Sure, but are you saying you would have this in addition to do variable sized
> varlena headers?

We could ... but right at the moment I'm thinking this would solve 80%
of the problem with about 1% of the work needed for the varlena change.
So my thought is to do this for 8.3 and then wait a couple releases to
see if the more extensive hack is really needed.  Even if we did
eventually install variable-sized varlena headers, this layout would
still be useful for types like inet/cidr.
        regards, tom lane