Rob -- 

>Hi,
>
>
>when I left work today these pg_toast tables were not in my database. when I 
>looked later ther were.
>
>
>Can anyone tell me where they came from and why they are automatically created 
>in every database?
>


You don't state what version of postgres this happens on, but in general TOAST 
tables are created by the system to hold long compressed values (typically text 
aka varlena tables). I think you can turn this facility off, but in general 
postgres will try to take very long strings, for example, and compress them, 
putting them into a toast table to that the row size of the original table 
doesn't grow excessively. See, for example, 
 <http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.0/interactive/storage-toast.html>

So I suspect what happened is that someone entered some long text values and 
postgres created the toast tables to handle these long strings.

HTH,

Greg Williamson
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