Re: Compression hacks?

On 02/24/11 10:55 PM, Yang Zhang wrote:
> For various workloads, compression could be a win on both disk space
> and speed (see, e.g.,
> http://blog.oskarsson.nu/2009/03/hadoop-feat-lzo-save-disk-space-and.html)
> I realize Postgresql doesn't have general table compression a la
> InnoDB's row_format=compressed (there's TOAST for large values and
> there's some old discussion on
> http://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/CompressedTables) but I thought I'd
> ask: anybody tried to compress their PG data somehow? E.g., any
> positive experiences running PG on a compressed filesystem (and any
> caveats)? Anecdotal stories of the effects of app-level large-field
> compression in analytical workloads (though I'd be curious about
> transactional workloads as well)? Thanks in advance.

compressed file systems tend to perform poorly on random 8K block
writes, which transactional databases do a lot of.