"Siddharth Anand" <sid@xxxxxxxx> writes: > My question wasn't phrased clearly. Oracle exhibits a performance > degradation for very large-sized fields (CLOB types that I equate to > PostGres' text type) when compared with the performance of field types > like varchar that handle a max character limit of a few thousand bytes in > Oracle. > It sounds like PostGres doesn't exhibit this same difference. I wanted to > understand how this could be and whether there was a trade-off. Ah. Well, the answer is that we change behavior dynamically depending on the size of the particular field value, instead of hard-wiring it to the declared column type. It sounds like Oracle's CLOB might be doing about the same thing as an out-of-line "toasted" field value in Postgres. In PG, text and varchar behave identically except that varchar(N) adds an insert-time check on the length of the field value --- but this is just a constraint check and doesn't have any direct influence on how the value is stored. regards, tom lane
