I am aware of the TOAST mechanism (actually complained about it in this forum...). The text fields I have are below the limits that trigger this mechanism, and also I may want to compress specific fields, not all of them. And also I have performance concerns as TOAST splits tables and can potentially cause a performance hit on queries.
My question is if PG can compress smaller text fields e.g 0.5-1KB, or must I do this outside PG?
On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel.stehule@gmail.com> wrote: > 2009/11/1 Shaul Dar <shauldar@gmail.com>: >> Hi, >> >> I have several long text fields in my DB that I would love to compress >> (descriptions, URLs etc). Can you tell me what options exists in PG >> (+pointers please), typical effect on space and run time? > > Hello > > You can do nothing. PostgreSQL compresses data automatically > > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.4/interactive/storage-toast.html
Well you can pick a strategy. But yeah, there's not much for the average user to do really.