Paper Title: Bring Compression to Postgres at Zero Performance Cost

Paper Abstract: This proposed talk would present a solution that allows Postgres users to achieve significant data storage savings through compression at zero CPU/performance cost. The key is to deploy Postgres on computational storage drives (CSDs) with built-in transparent compression. This proposed talk will discuss and present: (1) the inefficiency and performance penalty inherent in current practice of realizing data compression for Postgres, which relies on either filesystems (e.g., ZFS and Btrfs) or Linux block layer (e.g., RedHat VDO), (2) experimental results that show, by replacing commodity SSD with CSD with built-in transparency, one could reduce the storage cost by over 50% and meanwhile achieve the same or better Postgres TPS performance, and (3) experimental results that show, by deploying Postgres on CSD, one could largely reduce the fillfactor (e.g., from the default 100 to 75) at almost zero cost of physical storage capacity, while achieving over 2x higher TPS under update-intensive workloads.

Paper Author: Tong Zhang, Chief Scientist, ScaleFlux

Author Bio: Tong Zhang is currently a Professor in the Electrical, Computer and Systems Engineering Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), NY. He has graduated 20 PhD students, and authored/co-authored over 160 papers, with over 5,000 citations and h-index of 40. His current and past research spans over heterogeneous computing, data storage and management, memory fault tolerance, VLSI signal processing, and error correction coding and signal processing. In 2014, he co-founded ScaleFlux (San Jose, CA) to spearhead the commercialization of computational storage drives, and currently serves as its Chief Scientist. He is an IEEE Fellow.