Andrei Lepikhov gets under the hood:
I wanted to explore whether Postgres could be improved by thoroughly utilising all available tools, and for this, I chose the RTABench benchmark. RTABench is a relatively recent benchmark that is described as being close to real-world scenarios and highly selective. One of its advantages is that the queries include expressions involving the JSONB type, which can be challenging to process. Additionally, the Postgres results on RTABench have not been awe-inspiring.
Ultimately, I decided to review all of the benchmark queries, and fortunately, there aren’t many, to identify possible optimisations. However, already on the zero query, there were enough nuances that it was worth taking it out into a separate discussion.
Click through for a dive into this particular query and what Andrei did and some of the lessons you can draw from it.