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Comment by no1youknowz | Hacker News Reader

I see that fractal tree indexing was brought up back in 2003 for PG. http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/511B5F12.7060500@vmware...

But I don't see any patches. Would love to see something like this developed.

Also isn't there cstore_fdw for PG for compression? Although I know there are limitaitons with this, which has prevented me from using it. :(

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Further down that thread:

> Fractal tree indexes are patented. It is distributed as commercial extension to MySQL. So we can't include it into PostgreSQL core.

http://www.postgresql.org/message-id/CAPpHfdtV46zQjp88HR5U3h...

wow... thats pretty depressing

It's been a while - patents are designed to expire, and in this area they sometimes actually do.

Sometimes? I wasn't aware there were exceptions.

Here's the patent:

http://www.google.com/patents/US8185551

Regarding using the tech in OSS, there is an interesting discussion here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1hn7rg/whats_next_af... (see the comment from bradleykuszmaul a little ways down).

The TokuDB implementation of Fractal Trees uses a single-process, multi-threaded model, which is incompatible with PostgreSQL's multi-process model. In theory, one could patch TokuDB to be suitable, but this is a ton of work.

It's unrelated work. This is the "fractal tree" in question, open source: https://github.com/Tokutek/ft-index

Column store separates each column into separate file, while this stores the row in the index and does block compression of rows (most high level).

Column stores are only good for big reads and big inserts.

sequential (clustered) reads and primary append writes

Fwiw, the thread you linked is from 2013, not 2003. I don't believe the technique existed in 2003 (or if it did, it wasn't under this name).

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