Oleg Bartunov's Blog

While preparing for my talk to be given at PGCon 2022, I decided to share some important thoughts with the Postgres community. We’re going to change the way TOAST works, and it will have a positive impact on lives of many PostgreSQL contributors, developers and users in the upcoming years. It is also the rare case when I tackle commercial aspects of open source development, so it’s worth reading for everyone.

Last year Nikita Glukhov and me were working on JSONB performance improvements. As many of you know, we have found a number of possible optimizations enabling JSONB SELECT and UPDATE speed-up by several orders of magnitude. Our optimizations were mostly intended for long JSONB documents as modern application developers often create very simple database schemas like: CREATE TABLE (id int, data jsonb). Our guess was 100% right: a type-aware TOAST could work significantly better taking the properties of the given data type into account.

We have also experimented with performance of appendable bytea. When we optimized TOAST for append-only mode, it became possible to literally stream to PostgreSQL tables! So adjusting TOAST to certain workload also resulted in several orders of magnitude better performance.

As PostgreSQL 15 moves to the feature freeze stage, we’d like to share the news about our team’s JSONB-related patches committed to version 15. This milestone marks years of work for many people, so we will name and thank them all in this blog post.