Re: general design question

Curt Sampson <cjs(at)cynic(dot)net> writes:
> However, for tables that are already narrow, you may get little
> performance gain, or in some cases performance may even get worse,
> not to mention your data size blowing up bigger. Postgres has a
> quite high per-tuple overhead (31 bytes or more) so splitting small
> tables can actually cause growth and make things slower, if you
> frequently access both tables.

Right. The *minimum* row overhead in Postgres is 36 bytes (32-byte
tuple header plus 4-byte line pointer). More, the actual data space
will be rounded up to the next MAXALIGN boundary, either 4 or 8 bytes
depending on your platform. On an 8-byte-MAXALIGN platform like mine,
a table containing a single int4 column will actually occupy 44 bytes
per row. Ouch. So database designs involving lots of narrow tables
are not to be preferred over designs with a few wide tables.

AFAIK, all databases have nontrivial per-row overheads; PG might be
a bit worse than average, but this is a significant issue no matter
which DB you use.

regards, tom lane