Bridging the Gap Between Compressed and Uncompressed Data in Postgres: Introducing Compression Tuple Filtering

Postgres introduced columnar compression in 2019, which significantly reduced storage costs and boosted query performance. However, frequent updates, inserts, and deletes on compressed data posed a challenge to performance. With TimescaleDB 2.16.0, significant improvements have been made, delivering up to 500x faster updates and deletes and 10x faster upserts on compressed data. These optimizations make compressed data behave more like uncompressed data without sacrificing performance or flexibility. The compression tuple filtering feature allows for efficient filtering of data at multiple stages during DML operations, reducing the amount of work needed to execute queries and improving overall application performance.