Does YugabyteDB Support Certain Extensions Like pg_repack and pg_buffercache?

Distributed SQL Tips and Tricks Series
Marko Rajcevic

Certain PostgreSQL extensions such as pg_repack and pg_buffercache deal with the PostgreSQL storage layer directly. Although YugabyteDB reuses the Postgres query layer, we took a completely different approach to the storage layer. Due to this certain extensions, such as the two mentioned above, do not apply.

Why We Built YugabyteDB Reusing the PostgreSQL Query Layer>>>

pg_buffercache is an extension that provides visibility to the buffer cache, which with Postgres sits in shared memory. And while defining this buffer cache with YSQL, it is not actively used since caching takes place on the tserver. The TServer process has exposed metrics and visibility.

pg_repack is a PostgreSQL extension that lets you remove bloat from tables and indexes. Since YugabyteDB uses a LSM-tree-based storage engine, compactions remove any expired data, so there should be no need to use this extension on YugabyteDB.

Available PostgreSQL extensions>>>

Learn more about the YugabyteDB architecture including the query, transactions, sharding, replication, and storage layers>>>

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Marko Rajcevic

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