Column-oriented storage for PostgreSQL, implemented as a table access method. A table created USING pgcolumnar stores its data by column, with per-column compression, chunk-group skipping, and a vectorized aggregate path. It is for analytic workloads: large scans, aggregates, and column projections over append-mostly data.

pgColumnar builds from one source tree on PostgreSQL 15 through 19 and is licensed under the MIT License. It is pre-release; the version marker is 1.0-dev, recorded in VERSION. A table USING pgcolumnar is stored in the native on-disk format, PGCN v1.

Build with PGXS against the target server, add the library to shared_preload_libraries, and restart:

make PG_CONFIG=/path/to/pg_config
make install PG_CONFIG=/path/to/pg_config

shared_preload_libraries = 'pgcolumnar'

Then, in a database:

CREATE EXTENSION pgcolumnar;

CREATE TABLE events (id bigint, ts timestamptz, kind int, payload text)
  USING pgcolumnar;

INSERT INTO events
  SELECT g, now(), g % 8, 'p' || g
  FROM generate_series(1, 1000000) g;

SELECT count(*), avg(kind) FROM events WHERE kind = 3;

See the installation guide for requirements and the user guide for loading and querying.

pgColumnar is an independent implementation. It is not derived from the source of any other columnar project. It is built from a functional specification of the on-disk format and SQL interface, recorded in design/FORMAT_AND_INTERFACE_SPEC.md, by the clean-room method described in PROVENANCE.md.

MIT. See LICENSE.