Postgres with columnar compression in Hyperscale (Citus) on Azure

Citus Columnar, one of the big new features in Citus 10, is now available in preview in Hyperscale (Citus) on our Azure Database for PostgreSQL managed service! You can check out the  Citus 10 superpowers post  to learn more about the rest of the Citus 10 goodness.

Citus is an  open source extension  to Postgres (not a fork) that enables horizontal scale, but offers other great features, too.

This post will walk you through how to create and use columnar tables in Hyperscale (Citus). You can also take a look at the  columnar docs. Citus Columnar can be used with or without the scale-out features of Citus.

First some background: Postgres typically stores data using the  heap  access method, which is row-based storage. Row-based tables are good for transactional workloads, but can cause excessive IO for some analytic queries.

Columnar storage is a new way to store data in a Postgres table. Columnar groups data together by column instead of by row; and compresses the data, too. Arranging data by column tends to compress well, and it also means that queries can skip over columns they don’t need. Columnar dramatically reduces the IO needed to answer a typical analytic query—often by 10X!

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