Martijn van Oosterhout wrote:
Well, you get another issue, alignment. If you squeeze your string down, the next field, if it is an int or string, will get padded to a multiple of 4 negating most of the gains. Like in C structures, there is padding to optimise access.
Anecdotally I hear at least as many people say that their database is more I/O bound than CPU bound; and it seems that adding bytes for alignment is a way of reducing CPU for more disk I/O. I guess unaligned access so expensive that it makes up for the extra i/o? ---------------------------(end of broadcast)--------------------------- TIP 3: Have you checked our extensive FAQ? http://www.postgresql.org/docs/faq