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0 pointsants_a4y ago0 comments

The optimization engine is of course great (despite occasionally missing hard), but I am not referring to it. I am referring to the way that PostgreSQL executes query plans, the way rows are pulled up the execution tree, is very similar to first iterations JavaScript engines - a tree based interpreter. Picking out columns from rows and evaluating expressions used to work the same until PG11, where we got a bytecode based interpreter and a JIT for those. But so far rows are still working the same way, and it hurts pretty bad when row lookup is cheap and the rows end up either thrown away or aggregated together with basic math.

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mfreed4y ago· 2 in thread

With TimescaleDB compression, 1000 rows of uncompressed data are compressed into column segments, moved to external TOAST pages, and then pointers to these column segments are stored in the table's "row" (along with other statistics, including some common aggregates).

So while the query processor might still be "row-by-row", each "row" it processes actually corresponds to a column segment for which parallelization/vectorization is possible. And because these column segments are TOASTed, the row itself are just pointers, and you only need to read in those compressed column segments that you are actually SELECTing.

Anyway, might have known this, just wanted to clarify. Thanks for discussion!

nhoughto4y ago

yeah very interesting, i was wondering how timescale pushed postgres more towards columnar without rewriting a bunch of postgres itself.

My understanding of TOAST is that it itself is just a bunch of rows in a toast table that split the compressed "row" or in this case "1000 rows of 1 column" across as many rows as required to store the data whilst remaining within the postgres page size limits (normally 8kb).

With the often quoted postgres per row overhead of 23 bytes~ which you would have to pay for each TOAST row as well, does this not add up and eat into your storage efficiencies? or does compression work so well that the 23 bytes x N rows (1 row pointing to toast + N toast rows) required to store the "row" isn't important?

mfreed4y ago

The compressed column segment is stored in a single row in TOAST.

More info: https://blog.timescale.com/blog/building-columnar-compressio...

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