Re: row is too big: size 8168, maximum size 8160

Mario de Frutos Dieguez <mariodefrutos(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> Thank you for your quick answer. We have to think if we can rearrange it.
> The funny thing is that we have the same number of columns for other
> tables which are the same except for stored geometries and those
> stores the information without any problem.
> That's why I thought maybe is a corruption thing or something

No, it's just too many columns. If we suppose that the average width of
your numeric columns is 12 bytes, then you need 790*12 = 9480 bytes,
which doesn't fit on an 8K page even without any accounting for row
header and page header overhead. TOAST can't help by pushing values
out-of-line, because a TOAST pointer is 18 bytes so it'd actually make
things worse. (TOAST works well for individual large fields, but not
at all for this case.)

You can get away with 790 columns if they're 4 or 8 bytes apiece, or if
many of them are NULL, but evidently these particular numeric values
average more than that.

In practice, though, there are a lot of other inefficiencies with
tables that have so many columns. So I counsel looking into arrays
or some other approach.

regards, tom lane