Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

I've started working on a project where there is a fairly large table (about 82,000,000 rows) that I think is very bloated. One of the fields is defined as: consistency character varying NOT NULL DEFAULT 'Y'::character varying It's used as a boolean, the values should always either be ('Y'|'N'). Note: there is no check constraint, etc. I'm trying to come up with reasons to justify changing this field. Here is what I have: It's being used as a boolean, so make it that. Explicit is better than implicit. It will protect against coding errors because right now there anything that can be converted to text will go blindly in there. Here are my question(s). What about size/storage? The db is UTF-8. So, I think there really isn't much of a savings in that regard. It should be 1 byte for a boolean , but also 1 byte for a 'Y' in UTF-8 (at least that's what I get when I check the length in Python). Is there any other storage overhead here that would be saved? Query performance? Will Postgres get any performance gains for a where cause of " =TRUE " vs. " ='Y' "?

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel