Re: Am I best off keeping large chunks of text in a separate table?

On Sat, Sep 17, 2011 at 7:15 PM, Mike Christensen <mike(at)kitchenpc(dot)com> wrote:
>
> Man I've been reading this list for years now, and I kept on seeing
> this "TOAST" thing and just figured you people liked it for sandwiches
> or something.
>
> I feel like the programmer who thinks he's smart using a left bitshift
> operator to double an integer value just to find out the compiler
> already takes that optimization anyway.  Are you saying I don't
> actually need to de-frag my hard drive these days either?

Not if you're running most flavors of unix and not filling up the hard
drive too much. Ext3 and ext4 both tend to defrag as they go, and not
frag much anyway, especially if you leave a little bit of free space
for overhead. :)

> Thanks for the quick reply!  I will design my table in a way that
> logically makes sense to me.

Cool. Toast is one of those mad scientist ideas that really works and
works well. Before it pg had a pretty severe limit on text / varchar
columns.