Hi dear list,
I have a tricky question about TOASTED memory in Postgres related to the [pgpointcloud](https://github.com/pgpointcloud/pointcloud) extension. (using Postgres 11 if it matters)
So the pgpointcloud store sometimes very large groups of points into one row (TOASTED), something along few kB to few MB. TOAST would be in
EXTERNAL mode (no compression).From what I understand, for the moment it requires to fetch all the data from disk, then de-toast it, then select only the part of the data we are interested in.
Yet I think it is possible to detoast only a subset of the data (and thus fetch only some part of the data), considering that the [doc on toast](https://www.postgresql.org/docs/11/storage-toast.html) says
> " Use of
> (at the penalty of increased storage space) because these operations are optimized
> to fetch only the required parts of the out-of-line value when it is not compressed. "
> " Use of
EXTERNAL will make substring
operations on wide text and
bytea columns faster > (at the penalty of increased storage space) because these operations are optimized
> to fetch only the required parts of the out-of-line value when it is not compressed. "
So my question is how does it work, how easy would it be to implement for pgpointcloud?
Many thanks for your time and help
Remi-C
