Re: Proposal to use JSON for Postgres Parser format

On 2022-Sep-20, Matthias van de Meent wrote:

> Allow me to add: compressability
>
> In the thread surrounding [0] there were complaints about the size of
> catalogs, and specifically the template database. Significant parts of
> that (688kB of 8080kB a fresh PG14 database) are in pg_rewrite, which
> consists mostly of serialized Nodes. If we're going to replace our
> current NodeToText infrastructure, we'd better know we can effectively
> compress this data.

True. Currently, the largest ev_action values compress pretty well. I
think if we wanted this to be more succint, we would have to invent some
binary format -- perhaps something like Protocol Buffers: it'd be stored
in the binary format in catalogs, but for output it would be converted
into something easy to read (we already do this for
pg_statistic_ext_data for example). We'd probably lose compressibility,
but that'd be okay because the binary format would already remove most
of the redundancy by nature.

Do we want to go there?

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Álvaro Herrera 48°01'N 7°57'E — https://www.EnterpriseDB.com/
"Java is clearly an example of money oriented programming" (A. Stepanov)