RTFM

The acronym RTFM stands for Read The Fucking Manual. It’s quite obvious that reading the manual is the perfect approach for finding the correct information or at least a hint for finding the solution.

The false confidence or a lack of humbleness make people to forget how important is to read the documents. Understanding the documents is the next step, and is not simple indeed. In particular if the background is poor or the reader have preconceptions which alter the word meanings.

On the same message board mentioned in 1.4 an user asked some details about the binary data. Another “expert” explained how PostgreSQL had two ways of storing binary data. The bytea and the OID, which maximum size limit was respectively  one and two GB. I replied with a simple question. How is possible to store two GB in a four byte integer without strange voodoo rituals?

After an unpleasant argument finally the “expert” admitted he did not understood the mechanism used by PostgreSQL to workaround the TOASTed datum’s size limit. If you are curious about that, well, RTFM!