Jan Wieck <JanWieck@Yahoo.com> writes:
> Doesn't look that unrealistic to me. A plain text based substring
> function will reassemble the whole beast first before cutting out the
> wanted part. His manually chunked version will read only those chunks
> needed.
So does substr(), if applied to EXTERNAL (non-compressed) toasted text.
See John Gray's improvements a release or two back.
regards, tom lane