On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 12:51 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On 2022-10-17 17:14:21 -0400, Robert Haas wrote:
> > I have to admit that I worried about the same thing that Matthias
> > raises, more or less. But I don't know whether I'm right to be
> > worried. A variable-length representation of any kind is essentially a
> > gamble that values requiring fewer bytes will be more common than
> > values requiring more bytes, and by enough to justify the overhead
> > that the method has. And, you want it to be more common for each
> > individual user, not just overall. For example, more people are going
> > to have small relations than large ones, but nobody wants performance
> > to drop off a cliff when the relation passes a certain size threshold.
> > Now, it wouldn't drop off a cliff here, but what about someone with a
> > really big, append-only relation? Won't they just end up writing more
> > to WAL than with the present system?
>
> Perhaps. But I suspect it'd be a very small increase because they'd be using
> bulk-insert paths in all likelihood anyway, if they managed to get to a very
> large relation. And even in that case, if we e.g. were to make the record size
> variable length, they'd still pretty much never reach that and it'd be an
> overall win.
I think the number of cases where we will reduce the WAL size will be
far more than the cases where it will slightly increase the size. And
also the number of bytes we save in winning cases is far bigger than
the number of bytes we increase. So IMHO it seems like an overall win
at least from the WAL size reduction pov. Do we have some number that
how much overhead it has for encoding/decoding?
--
Regards,
Dilip Kumar
EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
