Re: page compression

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 10:10 AM, Andy Colson <andy(at)squeakycode(dot)net> wrote:
> I know its been discussed before, and one big problem is license and patent
> problems.
>
> Would this project be a problem:
>
> http://oldhome.schmorp.de/marc/liblzf.html

It looks like even liblzf is not going to be accepted. I have proposed
to only link against liblzf if available for pg_dump and have somehow
failed, see:

http://archives.postgresql.org/pgsql-hackers/2010-11/msg00824.php

Remember that PostgreSQL has toast tables to compress large values and
store them externally, so it still has to be proven that page
compression has the same benefit for PostgreSQL as for other
databases.

Ironically we also use an LZ compression algorithm for toast
compression (defined in pg_lzcompress.c). I am still failing to
understand why linking against liblzf would bring us deeper into the
compression patents mine field than we already are by hardwiring and
shipping this other algorithm in pg_lzcompress.c.

Joachim