Estimating the size (of the records) and the overhead in Postgres

Question

Consider the following table in Postgres 9.4:

CREATE TABLE t
(
  a1 bigserial,
  a2 bigint NOT NULL,
  a3 bigint NOT NULL,
  a4 integer, 
  a5 timestamp with time zone NOT NULL,
  a6 timestamp with time zone NOT NULL DEFAULT now(),
  a7 bigint NOT NULL,
  a8 bigint NOT NULL,
  a9 real,
  a10 integer,

  CONSTRAINT kkkey PRIMARY KEY (a1)
)

What are the estimated costs to save this table?

A record costs:

size(bigserial) 
+ size(bigint) 
+ size(bigint) 
+ size(integer) 
+ size(timestamp) 
+ size(timestamp) 
+ size(bigint) 
+ size(bigint) 
+ size(real) 
+ size(integer)
= 8 + 8 + 8 + 4 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 4 + 4 = 68 bytes

Database Page Layout of Postgres gives rather detailed information how the records land on the secondary storage, but I am not sure how to get all the numbers together.

The Linux reports

blockdev --getbsz /dev/sda1
1024

Questions:

(1) Are there any helper functions to assess the storage costs per Row (so one does not need to do those complicated computations by hand)

(2) How to put the numbers together, i.e., estimate the overhead costs for each row?

(3) How to estimate the costs for the primary key index?

Answer 1

Functions that give the size of columns, tables, and indexes are documented in the manual: http://www.postgresql.org/docs/9.4/static/functions-admin.html

There is no function to calculate the size of an entire record (while there is a function to know the storage cost of an individual data value (pg_column_size)), since records are in general of variable length (sometimes they are compressed), so I think you have two possibilities, either perform a catalog query to sum up all the sizes of the columns of a table, or simply get the size of a populated table and divide by the numbers of records, so to have an average size for record.