Re: Databases compared at zend.com

> As the person who wrote it :) It was my understanding that PostgreSQL
> stores large objects on the filesystem outside of the database tables.

Definitely not true.

I think that was once an available option, many years ago ... but
it's not there now.

> 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.

            regards, tom lane