Re: storing large amounts of text

Ross J. Reedstrom wrote:

> Just to give everyone here a head's up as to what's coming: The developers
> have long known that the size limit on tuple storage (particularly as it
> affects the 'text' type) needs to go away, and that the existing large
> objects (lo) are less than ideal as a work around. Jan Wieck has done
> the inital plan and development of a generic replacement: the Oversized
> Tuple Storage Technique (TOAST).
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/projects/devel-toast.html

    Look at

        http://www.postgresql.org/~wieck

    for   a   just   uploaded   snapshot  of  the  ongoing  TOAST
    development.  It demonstrates with a user defined  CLOB  type
    what the toaster actually can do to store a multiple MB sized
    string into a single attribute (of course,  one  table  could
    contain several CLOB columns and they get toasted as needed -
    biggest first).

> This system allows automatic compression and/or external storage of
> any datatype, directly in the database. It's still in development, but
> Jan has recently released a snapshot, so it's past the initial planning
> stages. For now, we'll all have to make do with lo or external file store,
> but there is hope on the horizon...

    AFAIK, we'll finally have a CLOB data type upward  compatible
    with  what's  in  the  above  snapshot.  So someone in really
    urgent need to get going with it please feel free to  contact
    me directly. The above is not meant to be used in production.
    But we should be able to create BLOB in the same way too  and
    create a useful after 7.0 feature patch in a few weeks.


Jan

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