parquet_fdw VS cstore_fdw

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