Re: Efficient use of space in large table?

On Fri, 5 Jul 2002, Manfred Koizar wrote:

> On Thu, 4 Jul 2002 21:43:10 -0500 (CDT), Josh Jore
> <josh@greentechnologist.org> wrote:
> >I was just wondering - I've got two large tables and I was wondering
> >if there is anyway to shrink them somewhat. I imagined compression for
> >non-indexed columns or something. Is varchar or char more efficient than
> >text?
> >
> Josh,
>
> first of all, text is ok.  You might want to store NULL instead of ''
> to squeeze out a few bytes here and there.

I just thought I'd follow up - it turns out that most of my space was
going to tuple headers (some 40ish bytes header, 16 bytes data). I just
took the data out of PostgreSQL and stuck it into partitioned ASCII files
and BerkeleyDB for indexes. That happens to work excellently and doesn't
require as fancy a machine as PostgreSQL did.

So the answer is to sometimesquestion your choice of tool ;-)