Idea: use bitmap instead of separate boolean columns in tuple table

[danielcompton]

I was looking at the schema for the triples table and saw a number of boolean columns. In Postgres, each column is stored as a byte, which costs 5 bytes for these flags:

  ea boolean NOT NULL,
  eav boolean NOT NULL,

  av boolean NOT NULL,
  ave boolean NOT NULL,

  vae boolean NOT NULL,

I wondered about converting these into a single flags column:

  flags char NOT NULL,

A char would only cost 1 byte, and would give you room for another 3 bit flags before you need to expand it to a 2-byte smallint. It looks like you would still be able to have partial indexes with bitfield calculations on the flags.

Just a thought, and a micro-optimization to save 4 bytes per triple, but I guess the triples will add up quickly!