Does Postgres compress data?

From: Mike Christensen <mike(at)kitchenpc(dot)com>
To: pgsql-general(at)postgresql(dot)org
Subject: Does Postgres compress data?
Date: 2012-05-24 01:07:01
Message-ID: CABs1bs1m3Qwn9cP+quXspVUm4YwXLWG_ZSxrLRg_n1wg-2VxdQ@mail.gmail.com
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If I run this query:

select sum(length(html)) from Indexer.Pages;

I get:

15,680,005,116

However, if I type:

C:\Program Files\PostgreSQL>dir /s

I get:

Total Files Listed:
5528 File(s) 7,414,385,333 bytes
575 Dir(s) 43,146,137,600 bytes free

So all the Postgres data on disk is a little over 7 gigs, however the
total sum of bytes in the HTML column of the Pages table is over 15
gigs.

Is PG compressing this data? I'm curious as I was considering
converting this column to a byte array and gzip'ing the data to save
space, however if PG is already doing this for me, then I'm not going
to bother. Thanks!

Mike

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