Ow Mun Heng wrote:
Anyhow, searching the archives (in my mail client - no internet at the moment), I see references that when I use TEXT, I will create TOAST tables which will have them lie _outside_ of my main data table.
The same is true of varchar, and quite a few other data types. There's more detail about which data types are and are not toastable, and how, in the PostgreSQL documentation.
> oh.. i didn't like the TOAST tables cos it's created
_not_ in my usual raidspace, but in my OS drive
My understanding was that toast tables were by default created in the same tablespace as their owning tables, but I could be wrong there. Again, the documentation will probably tell you for sure.
Note that if you are relying on RAID to protect your database but are not storing pg_clog, pg_xlog, etc on your RAID volume then you are experiencing a false sense of security. You must make sure to protect the whole cluster, including transaction logs etc. Similarly, if you're using volume-level snapshots rather than pg_dump or Pg's host cluster copy support to take backups you need to be able to get a consistent snapshot across ALL of the cluster.
If you want the database to live on the RAID volume, consider moving the whole cluster there.
-- Craig Ringer
