the bytea limit is 1gb (as are all datums in postgres).
pg_largeobject can go up to 2gb, but in either case you'd likely run
into severe performance/scalability issues long before objects began
approaching those size because of memory usage and other issues.  With
100kb objects though, you should be all right.

Thanks, Merlin. Yes, I am not worried so much about the size limits of a given field or row (not yet anyway). But I am concerned that all my data across all my tables really ends up in a single pg_largeobject table, which seems like it could be a bottleneck. Since it's blobs and generally big, I figure repeated access to the table doesn't really even benefit from caching that much like if I had a small table that was being hit a lot. I am worried about the overall table size of pg_largeobject as blobs are inserted in my various tables, but they only get an OID stored, whereas pg_largeobject gets all of the data across all of those tables.

I am concerned with backups/restores, crash recovery, partitioning options, etc. if most of my data is stored in the single pg_largeobject table. Can it be partitioned? How many blobs can it hold before it won't perform well?

And is there any performance gain if I had several pg_largeobject-like tables that I built myself using bytea types as it does? I mean, does PG perform any better if my queries are across a series of tables all with their own byteas rather than using LOs?

libpq supports a binary protocol mode which allows you to execute
queries sending bytea without escaping.  (I'm not familiar with the
jdbc driver, but I'd imagine it should support it in some fashion).  l
would start researching there: find out if the jdbc driver supports
binary queries and use them if possible.  If you can't or won't be use
jdbc in this way, your options are to stick with large objects or try
and figure out another way to get data into the database.
Thanks. I'll see what I can learn about bytea escaping in JDBC as I don't see anything obvious in its JDBC-specific PG docs. Perhaps it no longer suffers from each byte being converted into escaped characters, which really balloons already big enough data for the transfer protocols, and that would be great. Of course, it's all moot if there would not be any real performance gain to be had by having these objects stored across multiple tables rather than all being in pg_largeobject (most such data is not deleted, though it is often updated, so vacuumlo running daily generally isn't a problem for us).

David

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