cstore_fdw VS cute_headers

Columnar store PostgreSQL extension exists, here are two but I think I’m missing at least another one:

https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw

https://github.com/hydradatabase/hydra

You can also connect other stores using the foreign data wrappers, like parquet files stored on an object store, duckdb, clickhouse… though the joins aren’t optimised as PostgreSQL would do full scan on the external table when joining.

I'm definitely not from Citus data -- just a pg zealot fighting the culture war.

If you want to reach people who can actually help, you probably want to check this link:

https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw/issues

That appears to be the case:

https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw

>Important notice: Columnar storage is now part of Citus

either we go for RDS, but we stick to the AWS handpicked extensions (exit timescale, citus or their columnar storage, ... ),

Re: performance overhead, with FDWs we have to re-munge the data into PostgreSQL's internal row-oriented TupleSlot format again. Postgres also doesn't run aggregations that can take advantage of the columnar format (e.g. CPU vectorization). Citus had some experimental code to get that working [2], but that was before FDWs supported aggregation pushdown. Nowadays it might be possible to basically have an FDW that hooks into the GROUP BY execution and runs a faster version of the aggregation that's optimized for columnar storage. We have a blog post series [3] about how we added agg pushdown support to Multicorn -- similar idea.

There's also DuckDB which obliterates both of these options when it comes to performance. In my (again limited, not very scientific) benchmarking of on a customer's 3M row table [4] (278MB in cstore_fdw, 140MB in Parquet), I see a 10-20x (1/2s -> 0.1/0.2s) speedup on some basic aggregation queries when querying a Parquet file with DuckDB as opposed to using cstore_fdw/parquet_fdw.

I think the dream is being able to use DuckDB from within a FDW as an OLAP query engine for PostgreSQL. duckdb_fdw [5] exists, but it basically took sqlite_fdw and connected it to DuckDB's SQLite interface, which means that a lot of operations get lost in translation and aren't pushed down to DuckDB, so it's not much better than plain parquet_fdw.

This comment is already getting too long, but FDWs can indeed participate in partitions! There's this blog post that I keep meaning to implement where the setup is, a "coordinator" PG instance has a partitioned table, where each partition is a postgres_fdw foreign table that proxies to a "data" PG instance. The "coordinator" node doesn't store any data and only gathers execution results from the "data" nodes. In the article, the "data" nodes store plain old PG tables, but I don't think there's anything preventing them from being parquet_fdw/cstore_fdw tables instead.

[0] https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw

The citus extension for postgresql. https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw

- https://github.com/RandyGaul/cute_headers/blob/master/cute_s...

It's a simple and relatively straightforward approach that a sufficiently bright programmer would come up in their own while looking at the design constraints though, so overall I find it a bit meaningless to find the ultimate person for the "original idea".

The verdict for indie developers (not using Unity/Unreal) seems: just bite the bullet and buy FMOD (or Wwise or any of the popular proprietary audio engies).

I was actually searching for a good open-source audio library to use, and found out that my options aren't that good. SoLoud is a pain in the ass to install and integrate into an existing codebase, and OpenAL doesn't have any good implementations available (either proprietary or LGPL). I'm now just using a simple single-header audio library in cute_headers (https://github.com/RandyGaul/cute_headers/blob/master/cute_s...), but will probably switch to MiniAudio once the high-level API is finished (https://github.com/mackron/miniaudio/issues/196)

Currently I'm looking at a "header only" cute_tiled.h library that includes this instruction:

Thanks for the pure collision library share! As far as collision goes, decided to look up other libraries! 3D alternatives https://github.com/flexible-collision-library/fcl Alternatives to yours https://github.com/RandyGaul/cute_headers

single header libraries (https://github.com/nothings/stb , https://github.com/RandyGaul/cute_headers , etc) can do some of the heavy lifting. I use stb for OGG and PNG decoding, also true type support, and maybe a few other things.