3 ms·

Author here, happy to answer questions & criticism.

polskibus 6y ago
Did Microsoft follow up your research with some Postgresql patches? What is the MS policy/plans for enhancing Postgresql? On one hand MS sells competitor (Sql Server), on the other profits from Postgresql managed instances. How does it work out for Postgresql?
- anarazel 6y ago
  > Did Microsoft follow up your research with some Postgresql patches? Yes. I had committed them to the development branch before starting to write the post. There's a second post describing the concrete improvements that were committed: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/improving-postgres-connection-scalability-snapshots/ba-p/1806462 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-po... There's more to do, of course, but in my opinion this addresses the biggest issues. > What is the MS policy/plans for enhancing Postgresql? On one hand MS sells competitor (Sql Server), on the other profits from Postgresql managed instances. How does it work out for Postgresql? A few colleagues and I, all with a pre-MS history of contributing to Postgres, spend the majority of our time developing / maintaining open source Postgres. There's resulting features / patches in PG13 (released) and PG14 (in development). Committed work includes, spilling hash-joins, collation versioning, faster recovery / replication, connection scalability improvements among others.
  - polskibus 6y ago
    Thank you for your work on Postgresql. I'd like to pick your brain a bit more if you don't mind :) What is you view on Postgresql not having a true clustered index like ms sql has? I mean that the table is maintained sorted by PK all the time (table is stored as btree). Do you think there's a possibility of MS sponsoring it? Our experience with Postgresql shows that as the biggest drawback for many popular workloads compared to other RDBMSes.
    - anarazel 6y ago
      I think it would be neat to have - but personally I think there are higher priorities (asynchronous IO, faster executor, better buffer mapping, different connection model, built in automatic failover). And I don't think any of my colleagues was planning to work on the topic. A good implementation would be a lot of work, with an uncertain outcome at best. There have been a good number of efficiency improvements in the last releases to postgres' btree implementation in the last few releases. Not the same as what you're looking for, obviously, but it might still help.
    - taffer 6y ago
      OTOH this article [1] argues that clustered indexes are overrated and actually worse than heap tables for most use cases. [1] https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/clustering/index-organized-clustered-index https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/clustering/index-organize...

Did Microsoft follow up your research with some Postgresql patches? What is the MS policy/plans for enhancing Postgresql? On one hand MS sells competitor (Sql Server), on the other profits from Postgresql managed instances. How does it work out for Postgresql?

anarazel 6y ago
> Did Microsoft follow up your research with some Postgresql patches? Yes. I had committed them to the development branch before starting to write the post. There's a second post describing the concrete improvements that were committed: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-postgresql/improving-postgres-connection-scalability-snapshots/ba-p/1806462 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/azure-database-for-po... There's more to do, of course, but in my opinion this addresses the biggest issues. > What is the MS policy/plans for enhancing Postgresql? On one hand MS sells competitor (Sql Server), on the other profits from Postgresql managed instances. How does it work out for Postgresql? A few colleagues and I, all with a pre-MS history of contributing to Postgres, spend the majority of our time developing / maintaining open source Postgres. There's resulting features / patches in PG13 (released) and PG14 (in development). Committed work includes, spilling hash-joins, collation versioning, faster recovery / replication, connection scalability improvements among others.
- polskibus 6y ago
  Thank you for your work on Postgresql. I'd like to pick your brain a bit more if you don't mind :) What is you view on Postgresql not having a true clustered index like ms sql has? I mean that the table is maintained sorted by PK all the time (table is stored as btree). Do you think there's a possibility of MS sponsoring it? Our experience with Postgresql shows that as the biggest drawback for many popular workloads compared to other RDBMSes.
  - anarazel 6y ago
    I think it would be neat to have - but personally I think there are higher priorities (asynchronous IO, faster executor, better buffer mapping, different connection model, built in automatic failover). And I don't think any of my colleagues was planning to work on the topic. A good implementation would be a lot of work, with an uncertain outcome at best. There have been a good number of efficiency improvements in the last releases to postgres' btree implementation in the last few releases. Not the same as what you're looking for, obviously, but it might still help.
  - taffer 6y ago
    OTOH this article [1] argues that clustered indexes are overrated and actually worse than heap tables for most use cases. [1] https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/clustering/index-organized-clustered-index https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/clustering/index-organize...