Invest Once, Save a Million Times — LLVM-based Expression Compilation in PostgreSQL

We demonstrate how a surgical change to PostgreSQL’s evaluation strategy for SQL expressions can have a noticeable impact on overall query runtime performance. The present work is an exploration of how PostgreSQL can benefit if we trade SQL expression interpretation for compilation and thus turn repeated run time effort into a one-time query compile time task.

(This is an abridged version of a demonstration originally presented at VLDB 2016.)