Re: Databases compared at zend.com

From: "Tom Lane" <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

> > could someone please describe the actual process,
>
> Large objects are now stored in pg_largeobject.  Each LO is broken into
> chunks of a couple K apiece, and each chunk becomes a row.  (Chunking
> makes partial updates more efficient, since you don't have to rewrite
> the entire LO.)  The LO operations aren't really special, they're just a
> convenient interface for insert/update/delete operations in this table.
>
> Before 7.1, it worked the same except that each LO had its own table.

Perhaps a clear note in the docs - I definitely had the (mis-)impression
that LO's were standard files referenced by PG. That could have been my
background though, since that's how I tend to deal with documents/images
anyway.

- Richard Huxton