PostgreSQL Begins Working On Zstd Compression Support

While PostgreSQL has supported compression with its TOAST storage and over the past year has built-up LZ4 compression support for it along with compressing the WAL, backup compression, and other usage, PostgreSQL developers are preparing to further extend their compression capabiities with Zstd support.

This week started a discussion among PostgreSQL developers for adding Zstd as a supported compression algorithm by this widely-used, open-source database server.

That discussion turned out favorably and already with PostgreSQL Git there is now support for building PostgreSQL with Zstd included.

While this adds the --with-zstd build-time option and goes ahead and allows building with the Zstd compression library, at the moment this doesn't enable any actual usage of Zstd within PostgreSQL. Follow-up commits are expected soon to begin allowing PostgreSQL to take advantage of the speed Zstandard compression capabilities.

By the time PostgreSQL 15 rolls out it looks like it will have Zstd support buttoned up to complement all the LZ4 possibilities found currently with PostgreSQL 14. It's great seeing all the adoption around Zstd thanks to its good compression ratio while delivering very speedy decompression (and compression) for this dual licensed (BSD and GPLv2) Facebook-baced project.