Shaun Thomas: Burnt TOAST

A financial firm hired me in 2010 to revise their Postgres cluster architecture. During my stint there, I learned a healthy respect for their event_log table. But perhaps “respect” is the wrong word here, as it was more of a deep loathing. This table, you see, was the canonical ledger of system events and consisted of several million rows.The high row count wasn’t a problem by itself. We kept a tight visibility window and archived frequently. Unfortunately for us, one of the columns was an unconstrained TEXT type that commonly held a large blob of XML. Thus any fetch from this table was inordi