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I was really excited about the Citus column-store FDW...but it took me about an hour of using it before I realized it wasn't going to solve any of my problems a

I was really excited about the Citus column-store FDW...but it took me about an hour of using it before I realized it wasn't going to solve any of my problems any time soon. Queries with data larger than memory were slower than native tables. Compression didn't come anywhere close to the 2-4x improvement that was claimed. It doesn't support insert, update, or delete commands, let alone the insert from select that I was hoping to use. In order to convert a native table into a cstore table, you have to output to a file and then import using COPY, or hack it with a pipe to a COPY command. After a while, I realized that some of this was just the maturity of the extension, but a huge amount was the limitations of FDWs as a platform. And not only that, it seems that every other 3rd party FDW extension is either abandoned or ignored. Postgres is quite possibly the highest quality piece of software I use. I rate it higher than the Linux Kernel. But Postgres' historical approaches to extensibility have left a lot to be desired. Reading over this comment, I realize I probably sound like an entitled jackass, but I'll post it anyway. I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment. But I guess all I can say is that my (admittedly vague) wishlist for Postgres 9.5 is to enhance any and all features to support extensibility, including FDWs and Extensions.

buckbova 12y ago
> I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment. I'm sure they accept money in lieu of C skills. http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/ http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/
- saosebastiao 12y ago
  Good call...now I feel like even more of a jackass for not considering that :)
ozgune 12y ago
(Ozgun from Citus Data here) We're actively working on improving the cstore_fdw extension and your feedback is valuable to us. We're keeping a list of open issues on GitHub, and prioritize them for upcoming releases based on your comments. If you have any requests, please give us your feedback here: https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw/issues https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw/issues For performance and compression related questions, we'd also love to hear more from you and help if we can in any way: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cstore-users https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cstore-users As PostgreSQL covers a huge feature set, we know that it will take time on our end to get there. Some of that will involve new foreign table features from PostgreSQL core, such as foreign indexes and foreign table inheritance. I just wanted to let you know that we are working hard in that journey to get there.

buckbova 12y ago

> I really do wish I could contribute to Postgres, but learning C well enough to contribute is way out of reach for me at the moment. I'm sure they accept money in lieu of C skills. http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/ http://www.postgresql.org/about/donate/

saosebastiao 12y ago
Good call...now I feel like even more of a jackass for not considering that :)

ozgune 12y ago

(Ozgun from Citus Data here) We're actively working on improving the cstore_fdw extension and your feedback is valuable to us. We're keeping a list of open issues on GitHub, and prioritize them for upcoming releases based on your comments. If you have any requests, please give us your feedback here: https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw/issues https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw/issues For performance and compression related questions, we'd also love to hear more from you and help if we can in any way: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cstore-users https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/cstore-users As PostgreSQL covers a huge feature set, we know that it will take time on our end to get there. Some of that will involve new foreign table features from PostgreSQL core, such as foreign indexes and foreign table inheritance. I just wanted to let you know that we are working hard in that journey to get there.