Re: Commitfest 2021-11 Patch Triage - Part 2

On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 03:23:17PM -0500, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2021 at 2:51 PM Stephen Frost <sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> > I get that just compressing the entire stream is simpler and easier and
> > such, but it's surely cheaper and more efficient to not decompress and
> > then recompress data that's already compressed. Finding a way to pass
> > through data that's already compressed when stored as-is while also
> > supporting compression of everything else (in a sensible way- wouldn't
> > make sense to just compress each attribute independently since a 4 byte
> > integer isn't going to get smaller with compression) definitely
> > complicates the overall idea but perhaps would be possible to do.
>
> To me, this feels like an attempt to move the goalposts far enough to
> kill the project.

I don't know what version of the patch Stephen looked at, but the patches I
looked at were only compressing things like CopyData, which seems like it would
allow using compression when it'd be effective, without adding overhead to
cases where it won't.

IMO, the patch set should be presented differently, to use the existing zlib
and lz4 in 0001, and then add zstd in 0002 or later.

--
Justin