Boost Postgres Performance by 7x With Chunk-Skipping Indexes

PostgreSQL partitioning is a technique that divides large tables into smaller, more manageable pieces called partitions, enhancing performance and efficiency. However, not all queries are ideally suited for partitioning, especially when non-partitioned columns are used in WHERE clauses. To address this issue, TimescaleDB 2.16.0 introduces chunk-skipping indexes that can be defined on columnar sections of hypertables for specific data types. These indexes track the minimum and maximum values for a column in each chunk, allowing exclusion of chunks where queries would find no relevant data. This feature results in 7x faster performance with an 87% smaller storage footprint, thanks to compression.