Re: Datatypes and performance

On Fri, Jul 04, 2003 at 02:22:39PM -0700, Maksim Likharev wrote:
> Ok, what I see here tells me that text is slower then fixed len varchar,
> due to stored in separate table ( but how else you can store long fields
> ).
> so postgres has to read another page(s) in order to get long value.

That's regardless of the datatype: a varchar longer than 2 KiB IIRC will
be stored in a separate table, just as a text longer than 2 KiB.
There's no difference _at all_ for those two datatypes _except_ that the
former is checked for maximum length.  If you store 256 chars in a TEXT
field it will be in the main table as it were a varchar(256).

--
Alvaro Herrera (<alvherre[a]dcc.uchile.cl>)
"Nunca confiaré en un traidor.  Ni siquiera si el traidor lo he creado yo"
(Barón Vladimir Harkonnen)