On compression of everything in Postgres | Citus Con 2023

Video of a conference talk given by Andrey Borodin about the Postgres pglz algorithm to compress TOASTs and full page images in WAL. The talk examines the impact of Postgres features already committed, with lz4 everywhere. In this talk you’ll also learn about the prospects of compression application that are yet to come: protocol compression, temp files compression, WAL compression, and data segments compression.

Also discussed is the so-called “random access compressed file.” Having random write compressed files in the Postgres core would allow many very cool things. Andrey believes this component could increase OLTP performance by a significant multiplier on IO bottlenecked installations.

Andrey Borodin has been hacking on Postgres since 2016. He is an associated professor at Yandex School for Data Analysis and Ural Federal University.

► Video bookmarks:
⏩ 00:00 Introducing Andrey
⏩ 02:00 Andrey’s talk begins
⏩ 02:58 Basics of compression
⏩ 05:42 Pareto frontier
⏩ 07:06 pglz
⏩ 08:00 zlib
⏩ 08:40 Lz4
⏩ 09:34 Zstd
⏩ 10:26 Compression dictionaries
⏩ 15:30 WAL compression idea
⏩ 20:51 Protocol compression futures
⏩ 23:15 Temporary files compression (future, maybe)
⏩ 27:57 Q&A

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