Large Objects

Started by Peter Eisentrautover 24 years ago2 messagesdocs
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#1Peter Eisentraut
peter_e@gmx.net

Chapter 2, Programmer's Guide says:

| In Postgres, data values are stored in tuples and individual tuples
| cannot span data pages. Since the size of a data page is 8192 bytes, the
| upper limit on the size of a data value is relatively low. To support the
| storage of larger atomic values, Postgres provides a large object
| interface.

This is relatively untrue. We need to come up with a better reason for
why the large object interface exists, if only because the above *used* to
be true.

Any ideas?

--
Peter Eisentraut peter_e@gmx.net http://funkturm.homeip.net/~peter

#2Tom Lane
tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us
In reply to: Peter Eisentraut (#1)
Re: Large Objects

Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:

We need to come up with a better reason for
why the large object interface exists, if only because the above *used* to
be true.

Other than backwards compatibility, the only usefulness of the LO
interface (IMHO) is that it provides random access to LO contents ---
ie, the ability to read or write small chunks of a large value.
TOAST can't completely replace LOs until we have a similar capability
for large toasted values.

regards, tom lane