
PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers - pai1009
What are the examples of usage of PostgreSQL Foreign Data Wrappers?
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elchief
We have PG on a powerful box (256GB RAM, SSDs, 5000 core GPU), and use FDWs to
import data from other databases for analysis. For example, our main data
warehouse is on MS SQL Server, but not super fast, so we use a FDW to grab
data from there and analyze it quickly in PG. We also have an Oracle DB, and
there's an FDW for that too.

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bsg75
> our main data warehouse is on MS SQL Server, but not super fast

MSSQL on similar capacity hardware as PostgreSQL? Is the data restructured
once in PG for specific queries?

Curious as to why MSSQL is slower given it has some advantages for data
warehouse workloads such as query parallelism?

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elchief
The MS SQL Server is on a different, older, cheaper machine. The PostgreSQL
one is faster because it's newer and we had budget for it.

We also have two different database teams (actually more, it's a large
company): IT controls the data warehouse (MS SQL) and BI controls the analysis
server (PG)

As juliangoldsmith anticipated, we use PGStrom (also a FDW) so we can use our
GPU for super fast scans.

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bsg75
Easy, direct access to different external data formats:
[https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers](https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Foreign_data_wrappers)

Alternate storage types:
[https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw](https://github.com/citusdata/cstore_fdw)

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davyjones
file_fdw.

I have a file that keeps changing constantly. What was a file read/write at
app level has been replaced. Less code, direct access to data and readily
"ETL-able".

