Re: [HACKERS] Custom compression methods

On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 12:19 PM Tomas Vondra <tomas(dot)vondra(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>
wrote:

>
> On 3/19/19 10:59 AM, Chris Travers wrote:
> >
> >
> > Not discussing whether any particular committer should pick this up but
> > I want to discuss an important use case we have at Adjust for this sort
> > of patch.
> >
> > The PostgreSQL compression strategy is something we find inadequate for
> > at least one of our large deployments (a large debug log spanning
> > 10PB+). Our current solution is to set storage so that it does not
> > compress and then run on ZFS to get compression speedups on spinning
> disks.
> >
> > But running PostgreSQL on ZFS has some annoying costs because we have
> > copy-on-write on copy-on-write, and when you add file fragmentation... I
> > would really like to be able to get away from having to do ZFS as an
> > underlying filesystem. While we have good write throughput, read
> > throughput is not as good as I would like.
> >
> > An approach that would give us better row-level compression would allow
> > us to ditch the COW filesystem under PostgreSQL approach.
> >
> > So I think the benefits are actually quite high particularly for those
> > dealing with volume/variety problems where things like JSONB might be a
> > go-to solution. Similarly I could totally see having systems which
> > handle large amounts of specialized text having extensions for dealing
> > with these.
> >
>
> Sure, I don't disagree - the proposed compression approach may be a big
> win for some deployments further down the road, no doubt about it. But
> as I said, it's unclear when we get there (or if the interesting stuff
> will be in some sort of extension, which I don't oppose in principle).
>

I would assume that if extensions are particularly stable and useful they
could be moved into core.

But I would also assume that at first, this area would be sufficiently
experimental that folks (like us) would write our own extensions for it.

>
> >
> > But hey, I think there are committers working for postgrespro, who
> might
> > have the motivation to get this over the line. Of course, assuming
> that
> > there are no serious objections to having this functionality or how
> it's
> > implemented ... But I don't think that was the case.
> >
> >
> > While I am not currently able to speak for questions of how it is
> > implemented, I can say with very little doubt that we would almost
> > certainly use this functionality if it were there and I could see plenty
> > of other cases where this would be a very appropriate direction for some
> > other projects as well.
> >
> Well, I guess the best thing you can do to move this patch forward is to
> actually try that on your real-world use case, and report your results
> and possibly do a review of the patch.
>

Yeah, I expect to do this within the next month or two.

>
> IIRC there was an extension [1] leveraging this custom compression
> interface for better jsonb compression, so perhaps that would work for
> you (not sure if it's up to date with the current patch, though).
>
> [1]
>
> https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/20171130182009.1b492eb2%40wp.localdomain
>
> Yeah I will be looking at a couple different approaches here and reporting
back. I don't expect it will be a full production workload but I do expect
to be able to report on benchmarks in both storage and performance.

>
> regards
>
> --
> Tomas Vondra http://www.2ndQuadrant.com
> PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Remote DBA, Training & Services
>

--
Best Regards,
Chris Travers
Head of Database

Tel: +49 162 9037 210 | Skype: einhverfr | www.adjust.com
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