Re: TOAST issue on custom index access method

Carsten Kropf <ckropf2(at)fh-hof(dot)de> writes:
> I have a strange issue using a custom built index structure. My index access method support document type composed of words (as tsvector) and points (1-dimensional arrays of them). For internal reasons, I have to save the documents as a whole inside my structure (for proper reorganisations).
> So, I form the tuples using index_form_tuple with the proper description. Everything works fine, as long as the documents are quite small. However, if the tsvector becomes too large, I run into a problem of not being able to store the documents, because (obviously) the tsvector is too large for one page.

Well, of course. I think this is a fundamentally bad index design. You
didn't say exactly what sort of searches you want this index type to
accelerate, but perhaps you need a design closer to GIN, in which you'd
make index entries for individual words not whole documents.

> What I tried to solve this issue here, is to extract the words from the document (in my index) and calling 'Datum toast_compress_datum(Datum value)'in order to compress the tsvector into a proper toast table.

Indexes don't have toast tables.

regards, tom lane