I have a table in Pg like so
CREATE TABLE t (
a BIGSERIAL NOT NULL, -- 8 b
b SMALLINT, -- 2 b
c SMALLINT, -- 2 b
d REAL, -- 4 b
e REAL, -- 4 b
f REAL, -- 4 b
g INTEGER, -- 4 b
h REAL, -- 4 b
i REAL, -- 4 b
j SMALLINT, -- 2 b
k INTEGER, -- 4 b
l INTEGER, -- 4 b
m REAL, -- 4 b
CONSTRAINT a_pkey PRIMARY KEY (a)
)
The above adds up to 50 bytes per row. My experience is that I need another 40% to 50% for system overhead, without even any user-created indexes to the above. So, about 75 bytes per row. I will have many, many rows in the table, potentially upward of 145 billion rows, so the table is going to be pushing 13-14 Terabytes. What tricks, if any, could I use to compact this table? My possible ideas below --
Convert the REAL values to INTEGERs. If they can stored as SMALLINT, that is a saving of 2 bytes per field.
Convert the columns b .. m into an array. I don't need to search on those columns, but I do need to be able to return one column's value at a time. So, if I need column g, I could do something like
SELECT a, arr[5] FROM t;
Would I save space with the array option? Would there be a speed penalty?
Any other ideas?
