"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@pervasive.com> writes:
> Actually, it's BLCKSZ/4. From
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/storage-toast.html:
> "The TOAST code is triggered only when a row value to be stored in a
> table is wider than BLCKSZ/4 bytes (normally 2Kb)."
> BTW, 'row value' seems a bit prone to confusion (could be interpreted as
> the row itself). It'd probably be better to say 'field'.
No, because that would be wrong; the statement is correct as written.
The toaster tries to do something about rows that are wider than
BLCKSZ/4 (well, actually MaxTupleSize/4 ... try grepping the source
for TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD).
The OP's problem is that he's got too dang many fields. A TOAST pointer
is 20 bytes wide (on most machines, at least) so even if we toast every
single field out-of-line, we can't support more than about 400 toastable
fields in a row. The FAQ says
Maximum number of columns in a table? 250-1600 depending on column
types
but the 1600 figure is for datatypes like int4 that only take 4 bytes
anyway.
The OP was trying to store numeric(11,2) fields. If I'm counting on my
fingers correctly, such a value would occupy 16 bytes natively, which
means that pushing it out-of-line would be a dead loss anyway. But he's
still not going to get more than 512 of them into an 8K page.
regards, tom lane