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This is actually really similar to how SQL Server has long encoded it's varchar(max) format as I understand it. Short text is stored on the row page, but longer text is bumped to a different page.

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Postgres does the same thing, however AFAIK postgres does not use a fixed-size string which happens to have inline string data: text is always variable, and stored inline up to 127 bytes (after compression).

These are different because the inline segment is fixed-size, and always exposes a 4 bytes prefix inline even when the buffer is stored out of line.

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