Re: Significantly larger toast tables on 8.4?

Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> I think the right value for this setting is going to depend on the
> environment. If the system is starved for cpu cycles then you won't want to
> compress large data. If it's starved for i/o bandwidth but has spare cpu
> cycles then you will.

> If that's true then we really have to expose this parameter to users. There
> won't be a single value that is appropriate for everyone.

Yeah. The commit message for these changes commented

There was some discussion in the earlier threads of exposing some
of the compression knobs to users, perhaps even on a per-column
basis. I have not done anything about that here. It seems to me
that if we are changing around the parameters, we'd better get some
experience and be sure we are happy with the design before we set
things in stone by providing user-visible knobs.

and I'm still pretty worried about the longevity of any knob we put in
here. But we might not have a lot of choice.

It would be fairly easy, I think, to add some reloption fields that
would let these parameters be controlled on a per-table level.
Per-column would be much more painful; do we really need that?

regards, tom lane