Postgres Vision 2019

For PostgreSQL 12, the PostgreSQL developers, including Andres Freund, have worked hard at making table storage pluggable, i.e. allowing to store table data in different forms than PostgreSQL's current heap.

The goal of this work so is mainly twofold: First, to be able to address new use cases that PostgreSQL's current storage is not well suited for (e.g. columnar stores for analytics workloads). Second, to be able to make architectural changes to even better handle workloads PostgreSQL is already widely used for (e.g. to reduce problems with VACUUM and increase storage density.

In addition to the reasons for making Postgres' table storage pluggable, the talk will give a brief overview over the new API, explain what types of table stores can already be implemented using it,  and what types are not yet possible, and how the limitations of the API prevent the latter can be addressed in future versions of PostgreSQL.