PostgreSQL Begins Working On Zstd Compression Support

Written by Michael Larabel in Free Software on 19 February 2022 at 07:42 AM EST. 12 Comments
FREE SOFTWARE
While PostgreSQL has supported compression with its TOAST storage and over the past year has built-up LZ4 compression support for it along with compressing the WAL, backup compression, and other usage, PostgreSQL developers are preparing to further extend their compression capabiities with Zstd support.

This week started a discussion among PostgreSQL developers for adding Zstd as a supported compression algorithm by this widely-used, open-source database server.

That discussion turned out favorably and already with PostgreSQL Git there is now support for building PostgreSQL with Zstd included.


While this adds the --with-zstd build-time option and goes ahead and allows building with the Zstd compression library, at the moment this doesn't enable any actual usage of Zstd within PostgreSQL. Follow-up commits are expected soon to begin allowing PostgreSQL to take advantage of the speed Zstandard compression capabilities.

By the time PostgreSQL 15 rolls out it looks like it will have Zstd support buttoned up to complement all the LZ4 possibilities found currently with PostgreSQL 14. It's great seeing all the adoption around Zstd thanks to its good compression ratio while delivering very speedy decompression (and compression) for this dual licensed (BSD and GPLv2) Facebook-baced project.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week