Re: Compression in PG

Guys,

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?

-- Shaul

On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 5:57 PM, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>wrote:

> On Sun, Nov 1, 2009 at 7:56 AM, Pavel Stehule <pavel(dot)stehule(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
> > 2009/11/1 Shaul Dar <shauldar(at)gmail(dot)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.
>