"Jim C. Nasby" <jnasby@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes: > Actually, it's BLCKSZ/4. From > http://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/interactive/storage-toast.html: > "The TOAST code is triggered only when a row value to be stored in a > table is wider than BLCKSZ/4 bytes (normally 2Kb)." > BTW, 'row value' seems a bit prone to confusion (could be interpreted as > the row itself). It'd probably be better to say 'field'. No, because that would be wrong; the statement is correct as written. The toaster tries to do something about rows that are wider than BLCKSZ/4 (well, actually MaxTupleSize/4 ... try grepping the source for TOAST_TUPLE_THRESHOLD). The OP's problem is that he's got too dang many fields. A TOAST pointer is 20 bytes wide (on most machines, at least) so even if we toast every single field out-of-line, we can't support more than about 400 toastable fields in a row. The FAQ says Maximum number of columns in a table? 250-1600 depending on column types but the 1600 figure is for datatypes like int4 that only take 4 bytes anyway. The OP was trying to store numeric(11,2) fields. If I'm counting on my fingers correctly, such a value would occupy 16 bytes natively, which means that pushing it out-of-line would be a dead loss anyway. But he's still not going to get more than 512 of them into an 8K page. regards, tom lane
