How are null's stored?
Jim Nasby <jim@nasby.net>
From: "Jim C. Nasby" <jim@nasby.net>
To: pgsql-performance@postgresql.org
Date: 2003-05-12T19:01:56Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers, pgsql-performance
I have a 40M row table I need to import data into, then use to create a bunch of more normalized tables. Right now all fields are varchar, but I'm going to change this so that fields that are less than a certain size are just char. Question is, how much impact is there from char being nullable vs. not nullable? src/include/access/htup.h indicates that nulls are stored in a bitmap, so I'd suspect that I should see a decent space savings from not having to include length information all the time... (most of these small fields are always the same size no matter what...) -- Jim C. Nasby (aka Decibel!) jim@nasby.net Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828 Windows: "Where do you want to go today?" Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?" FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"