cstore_fdw VS TimescaleDB

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

Don't forget PostgreSQL extensions. For something like a chat log, TimescaleDB (https://www.timescale.com/) can be surprisingly efficient. It will handle partitioning for you, with additional features like data reordering, compression, and retention policies.

Offboard it to Postgres specialists like https://www.timescale.com/

TimescaleDB{:target="_blank"}: an extension of PostgreSQL that adds time-series capabilities to the relational database model. It provides scalability and performance optimizations for handling large volumes of time-stamped data while maintaining the flexibility of a relational database.

Have some experience with https://www.timescale.com in this context

What about getting in touch with commercial organisations that have products/services based on PostgreSQL? For example Timescale, EDB, and Citus Data, or really any hosting provider that offers a managed PostgreSQL service.

There is Timescale.

Friends don't let their friends choose Mysql :)

A super long time ago (decades) when I was using Oracle regularly I had to make a decision on which way to go. Although Mysql then had the mindshare I thought that Postgres was more similar to Oracle, more standards compliant, and more of a real enterprise type of DB. The rumor was also that Postgres was heavier than MySQL. Too many horror stories of lost data (MyIsam), bad transactions (MyIsam lacks transaction integrity), and the number of Mysql gotchas being a really long list influenced me.

In time I actually found out that I had underestimated one of the most important attributes of Postgres that was a huge strength over Mysql: the power of community. Because Postgres has a really superb community that can be found on Libera Chat and elsewhere, and they are very willing to help out, I think Postgres has a huge advantage over Mysql. RhodiumToad [Andrew Gierth] https://github.com/RhodiumToad & davidfetter [David Fetter] https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfetter are incredibly helpful folks.

I don't know that Postgres' licensing made a huge difference or not but my perception is that there are a ton of 3rd party products based on Postgres but customized to specific DB needs because of the more liberalness of the PG license which is MIT/BSD derived https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

Some of the PG based 3rd party DBs:

Enterprise DB https://www.enterprisedb.com/ - general purpose PG with some variants

Greenplum https://greenplum.org/ - Data warehousing

Crunchydata https://www.crunchydata.com/products/hardened-postgres - high security Postgres for regulated environments

Citus https://www.citusdata.com - Distributed DB & Columnar

Timescale https://www.timescale.com/

Why Choose PG today?

If you want better ACID: Postgres

If you want more compliant SQL: Postgres

If you want more customizability to a variety of use-cases: Postgres using a variant

If you want the flexibility of using NOSQL at times: Postgres

If you want more product knowledge reusability for other backend products: Postgres

TimescaleDB is Postgres with extensions to automatically partition tables for fast processing of time series data.