Horton

TOAST versus toast

Peter Smith <smithpb2250@gmail.com>

View thread
From: Peter Smith <smithpb2250@gmail.com>
To: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-01-16T03:57:49Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. doc: TOAST not toast

Attachments

Hi,

During some recent reviews, I came across some comments mentioning "toast" ...

TOAST is a PostgreSQL acronym for "The Oversized-Attribute Storage
Technique" [1].

But, toast is just toast [2].

~

AFAIK it is usual practice to uppercase acronyms to distinguish them
from ordinary words, but PostgreSQL currently has a scattered mixture
of "TOAST" versus "toast". Usage seems about 50:50.

Now that I have seen the problem I can't unsee it, and it is
everywhere, so here is a patch to address all the lowercase toast in
the documentation.

Note, for the unusual cases I have used the same wording as per the
original TOAST page [1], so:
- "toasted" becomes "TOASTed".
- "toastable" becomes "TOAST-able"
- "untoasted" becomes "un-TOASTed"
- "detoasted" is unchanged (and so is "detoast")

~~~

There are many more "toast" examples found in the source code
comments, but I'll first wait to see if this patch is accepted before
looking to address those.

======
[1] TOAST -- https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/storage-toast.html
[2] toast -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toast_(food)

Kind Regards,
Peter Smith.
Fujitsu Australia