On Thu, 15 Nov 2007 20:35:35 +0200
"Andrus" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> "PostgreSQL 8.2.3 on i686-pc-mingw32, compiled by GCC gcc.exe (GCC) 3.4.2 
> (mingw-special)"
> Database size in disk returned by  pg_database_size() is 210 MB
> 
> Database compressesed  backup file size is now 125 MB.
> This seems too much. I expect compression to decrease size 10 times, also 
> indexes are not backed up. A year ago compressed backup size was 9 MB only.
> 
> I created query returning biggest tables with and without indexes and found:
> 
>       1  pg_toast_22185                      95 MB           96 MB
>       2  rid                                 21 MB           27 MB
>       3  klient                              13 MB           19 MB
>       4  mailbox                             10 MB           11 MB
>       5  dok                                 7640 kB         12 MB
>       6  desktop                             8080 kB         8200 kB
>       7  strings                             5536 kB         6584 kB
>       8  pg_toast_22338                      5232 kB         5368 kB
> 
> ...
> 
> Questions:
> 
> 1. Tables are relatively small and thus cannot create 125 MB compressed 
> backup file.
> Why backup file sis so big ?
I assume that "mailbox" contains e-mail messages as the name suggest... One can 
assume that those emails also have attachments like pdf, jpg and other mostly 
incompressible file format.

In my understanding of postgresql, when you a have a variable length field 
(like text or bytea), pg will only stores the first bytes (hundreds or so) of 
that field in the main table and then put the rest in an "hidden[1]" TOAST 
table.

> 2. How to determine what data is containing in  pg_toast_22185  ?
If you have PGAdmin at hand or you can install it, its quite easy, just enable 
"Show System Objects" under the "View" menu [2]. Based on my assumptions, I 
guess it's the TOAST of the field which contains the body of your emails...

Enough wild guesses,
HTH,
--
MaXX

[1] hidden: transparent from an user point of view
[2] you can also obtain those information from the information schema IIRC

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