Re: Are there plans to add data compression feature to postgresql?

On Oct 29, 2008, at 10:43 PM, Joshua D. Drake wrote:

> Steve Atkins wrote:
>> On Oct 29, 2008, at 9:50 PM, Grant Allen wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>> One other thing I forgot to mention:  Compression by the DB trumps
>>> filesystem compression in one very important area -
>>> shared_buffers! (or buffer_cache, bufferpool or whatever your
>>> favourite DB calls its working memory for caching data).  Because
>>> the data stays compressed in the block/page when cached by the
>>> database in one of its buffers, you get more bang for you memory
>>> buck in many circumstances!  Just another angle to contemplate :-)
>> The additional latency added by decompression is reasonably small
>> compared with traditional disk access time. It's rather large
>> compared to memory access time.
>
> The one place where Compression is an immediate benefit is the wire.
> It is easy to forget that one of our number one bottlenecks (even at
> gigabit) is the amount of data we are pushing over the wire.

Wouldn't "ssl_ciphers=NULL-MD5" or somesuch give zlib compression over
the wire?

Cheers,
   Steve