How to reduce size of PostgreSQL table after dropping columns? I have a PostgreSQL database. One table is very large. I want to extract a TEXT column into a separate table and see how much I can reduce the size. The problem is that the size appears to stay the same no matter what I do.

I'm obtaining the size by issuing \dt+ in psql.

I've tried VACUUM FULL and dp_dumpall followed by deleting the database and restoring it.

The size of the table did not change.

I added a second TEXT column, watched the size increase by a few hundred MB, deleted the column, and I cannot get the size to go down again.

How can I get the size of the table to go down after deleting these columns?
TEXT type columns arent stored with the table data. PostgreSQL treats them like a blob and use a toast table to store the actual data. Maybe thats the reason that you are not seeing the table size shrink.