On Fri, Jan 2, 2009 at 09:01, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: >The argument was that compressing/decompressing such large chunks would >require a lot of CPU effort; also it would defeat attempts to fetch >subsections of a large string. In the past we've required people to >explicitly "ALTER TABLE SET STORAGE external" if they wanted to make >use of the substring-fetch optimization, but it was argued that this >would make that more likely to work automatically.
It is *way* faster here are some ruff numbers: $ cat q.sql select length(substring(debug, 1024, 1024)) from dies where die_id = 295; $ ./pgbench -T60 -n -f q.sql 8.4: 1532.327546 8.3: 21.295657 Thats with 8.4 as a --enable-debug --enable-cassert build! (8.3 just has --enable-debug) > I'm not entirely convinced by Alex' analysis anyway; the only way > those 39 large values explain the size difference is if they are > *tremendously* compressible, like almost all zeroes. The toast > compressor isn't so bright that it's likely to get 10X compression > on typical data. Well its certainly not all zeros, but those big rows are the same message repeated (~5k) until perl detected endless recursion died... So its not exactly typical or *useful* data either. The other 51, 971 rows (rows smaller than 1024*1024 bytes) account for 174MB while those 39 account for the other 828MB. Mainly I was just alarmed by the size increase. But I think the pgbench numbers make me happy even if I never do a substring on that data... ------------------ # 8.3 select pg_size_pretty(pg_column_size(debug)) from dies where die_id = 295; pg_size_pretty ---------------- 1256 kB select pg_size_pretty(pg_column_size(debug)) from dies where die_id = 295; pg_size_pretty ---------------- 22 MB select pg_size_pretty(sum(row_size)) from ( select coalesce(pg_column_size(action), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(die_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(cparam), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(date_created), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(db_profile), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(debug), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(defunct), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(env), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(login), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(msg), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(open_user_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(page_load_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(session_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(state), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(state_action), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(user_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(whoops), 0) as row_size from dies ) as foo where foo.row_size < 1024*1024; pg_size_pretty ---------------- 174 MB select pg_size_pretty(sum(row_size)) from ( select coalesce(pg_column_size(action), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(die_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(cparam), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(date_created), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(db_profile), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(debug), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(defunct), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(env), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(login), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(msg), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(open_user_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(page_load_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(session_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(state), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(state_action), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(user_id), 0) + coalesce(pg_column_size(whoops), 0) as row_size from dies ) as foo where foo.row_size < 1024*1024; pg_size_pretty ---------------- 828 MB -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers