Query 1B Rows in PostgreSQL >25x Faster with Squirrels!
The One Billion Row Challenge has been making waves in the data engineering community lately. Originally created to test CSV parsing performance, the challenge involves processing a file containing 1 billion weather measurements to calculate basic temperature statistics for each city. In this post, I'll tackle a variation of this challenge using PostgreSQL and demonstrate how to achieve dramatic performance improvements using Squirrels.
The Challenge
The original One Billion Row Challenge focuses on raw CSV processing performance. For our variation, we'll:
- Load 1 billion rows into PostgreSQL with additional columns
- Query for city-level temperature statistics
- Create a Squirrels project to serve these analytics via REST API
- Demonstrate significant query performance improvements
- Show how to handle incremental data updates