TOAST termacronym

Postgres mechanism for storing large field values out-of-line

Postgres pages are 8KB. Large values (>2KB) get compressed and/or moved to a side table (TOAST table). Mostly invisible but matters for performance: TOAST'd columns mean extra IO on read.

aliases: The Oversized-Attribute Storage Technique

topics: databases, internals, postgres

references:

Postgres — TOAST