Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> The scenario I was describing was having, for example, 20 fields each
> of which are char(100) and store 'x' (which are padded with 99
> spaces). So the row is 2k but the fields are highly compressible, but
> shorter than the 256 byte minimum.
To be blunt, the solution to problems like that is sending the DBA to a
re-education camp. I don't think we should invest huge amounts of
effort on something that's trivially fixed by using the correct datatype
instead of the wrong datatype.
regards, tom lane