Re: Compression and on-disk sorting

Jim C. Nasby wrote:
>
> There's an fadvise that tells the OS to compress the data if it actually
> makes it to disk?

Compressed-filesystem extension (like e2compr, and I think either
Fat or NTFS) can do that.

I think the reasons against adding this feature to postgresql are
largely the same as the reasons why compressed filesystems aren't
very popular.

Has anyone tried running postgresql on a compressing file-system?
I'd expect the penalties to outweigh the benefits (or they'd be
more common); but if it gives impressive results, it might add
weight to this feature idea.

Ron M

I think the real reason Oracle and others practically re-wrote
their own VM-system and filesystems is that at the time it was
important for them to run under Windows98; where it was rather
easy to write better filesystems than your customer's OS was
bundled with.