Date: 2018-10-25
Time: 12:50–13:40
Room: New York
Level: Intermediate
PostgreSQL has long prided itself in being extensible. But for a number of years people have wished for the ability to not only introduce new datatypes and functions, but also to add new forms of storing data. The introduction of foreign data wrappers (FDWs) allowed to satisfy some of those use-cases. They however are not fully suitable for native data storage, quite fundamentally they don't allow for index creation, foreign keys, etc.
Over the last years people have on and off worked on making table storage pluggable. It looks like PostgreSQL 12 might finally get builtin support for that, based on work of Haribabu Kommi, myself and others.
This talk will go over the reasons why it is useful to make storage pluggable (my personal reason is to allow the introduction of zheap, a new undo based table storage that is nearly free of table bloat) and how the new APIs work, and what further use-cases the pluggable storage APIs have.
The following slides have been made available for this session: