PostgreSQL Column Byte Packer

tl;dr: Provides facilities for laying out table column order to optimize for disk space usage both in ActiveRecord migrations and pg_dump generated SQL schema files. The general idea and relevant PostgreSQL internals are described in On Rocks and Sand.

Installation

Add this line to your application’s Gemfile:

gem 'pg_column_byte_packer'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install pg_column_byte_packer

Usage

There are two ways you can use this library to byte-pack your tables’ column layout:

Re-ordering columns using ActiveRecord migrations

Loading the library automatically patches ActiveRecord’s table creation tree walker to automatically re-order columns by alignment size. Therefore all create_table calls in ActiveRecord migrations executed after loading the gem will be byte-packing optimized.

Note: Because you need the full table definition to re-order columns, the most benefit occurs when the full table is created in one step (rather than added onto with repeated add_column migrations).

Re-ordering SQL structure files (from pg_dump)

ActiveRecord defaults to saving your application’s database structure to a schema.rb file (which is essentially all of the ActiveRecord migrations commands you’d need to generate the current state of the database). However you can also configure it to save a copy of the database structure in SQL format by setting config.active_record.schema_format = :sql in your config/application.rb file. With this configuration (and running against a PostgreSQL database) ActiveRecord executes the pg_dump utility (included in the PostgreSQL client tools) against your database to generate a structure.sql file.

If you have an existing structure.sql file (or any structure-only file generated by pg_dump), you can update that file to have byte-packed CREATE TABLE statements with the following:

PgColumnBytePacker::PgDump.sort_columns_for_definition_file(
  "<path to structure.sql file>",
  connection: ActiveRecord::Base.connection
)

Note: an ActiveRecord connection object is required so that the library can properly determine the data types (and their respective alignment requirements) and column metadata (e.g., DEFAULT and NOT NULL).

Development

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run bundle exec rspec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment. This project uses Appraisal to test against multiple versions of ActiveRecord; you can run the tests against all supported version with bundle exec appraisal rspec.

Running tests will automatically create a test database in the locally running Postgres server. You can find the connection parameters in spec/spec_helper.rb, but setting the environment variables PGHOST, PGPORT, PGUSER, and PGPASSWORD will override the defaults.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install. To release a new version, update the version number in version.rb, commit the change, and then run bundle exec rake release, which will create a git tag for the version, push git commits and tags, and push the .gem file to rubygems.org. To ignore local changes (say to .ruby-version) you can do rake build release:source_control_push release:rubygem_push.

Note: if while releasing the gem you get the error Your rubygems.org credentials aren't set. Run `gem push` to set them. you can more simply run gem signin.

License

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.