At 06:46 PM 2/23/00 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
>Just quietly make text compressed-under-the-hood, you mean? Hmm.
Yep...
>Interesting idea, all right, and it wouldn't create any long-term
>compatibility problem since users couldn't see it directly. I think
>we might have some places in the system that assume char/varchar/text
>all have the same internal representation, but that could probably
>be fixed without too much grief.
I've kind of assumed this might be the case, but have truly been
too busy to dig around looking (which in my case takes a fairly
long time because I'm really only barely familiar with the code)
>> The price of compression/decompression is to some extent
>> balanced by not having to drag as many bytes around during joins
>> and sorts and the like.
>
>Also, there could be a threshold: don't bother trying to compress
>fields that are less than, say, 1K bytes.
Right, I thought about that possibility, too, but it seems a bit
more complicated so I thought I'd raise the simpler-sounding idea
first :)
- Don Baccus, Portland OR <dhogaza@pacifier.com> Nature photos, on-line guides, Pacific Northwest Rare Bird Alert
Serviceand other goodies at http://donb.photo.net.