Allright... do you mean an alignment with an offset of 4/8 bit or byte? If it is just bit I cannot really follow the calculation... Nevertheless it sounds like an explanation for this "effect". I have one more question concerning size. The following table create table test(val0 unsigned smallint, ... ... ... .. ..., val7 unsigned smallint, bulk bytea); needs app. 100 Bytes per row even though the user data only uses 8*2Bytes (vali) + 40Bytes (the sizye of my bytea). Does that mean, that the system needs 46 bytes for internal represantationsor is the alignment factor a again a source of this "blowup"? Thanks for your help, Tschak
