Help with TOAST Compression

["David Hinkle" <hinkle(at)cipafilter(dot)com>]

I have a table where I store email,  the bodies are mostly kept in a toast table.    The toast table is 940 Meg in size.   The whole database is about 1.2 Gig in size.   When I back the database up using pg_dump in custom output mode, I pipe the output into gzip.   My backups are only about 600 meg in size.   From this, I assume the that toe toast table isn’t getting compressed.

 

I am keeping the bodies in a column of type “bytea”. 

 

Is there any way I can tell for sure if the messages from this column are being stored compressed?   I know I can set the compression settings using the “ALTER TABLE ALTER SET STORAGE” syntax, but is there a way I can see what this value is currently set to?

 

David