Historical Note

Originally, Postgres 4.2 supported three standard implementations of large objects: as files external to Postgres, as UNIX files managed by Postgres, and as data stored within the Postgres database. It causes considerable confusion among users. As a result, we only support large objects as data stored within the Postgres database in PostgreSQL. Even though is is slower to access, it provides stricter data integrity. For historical reasons, this storage scheme is referred to as Inversion large objects. (We will use Inversion and large objects interchangeably to mean the same thing in this section.)