Supabase OrioleDB Patent: now freely available to the Postgres community

Re:Supabase OrioleDB Patent: now freely available to the Pos... by jitl on Thursday September 11, 2025 @08:54AM (#45210986)

Ah gotcha. My understanding of the heap reference was that heap lookups involve traversing a heap-like tree data structure, not a direct link to a specific leaf page.

Based on the limited description of OrioleDB I understand it works like SQLite WITHOUT ROWID, actually storing the row tuple in the primary key b-tree, but I didn’t go read the code

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Re:Supabase OrioleDB Patent: now freely available to the Pos... by Sesse__ on Friday September 12, 2025 @03:05AM (#45219435)

It's confusing nomenclature, but Postgres' “heap” is not a heap (B-tree) data structure. It is just a bunch of blocks all on the same level, similar to how the “heap” in an operating system (as opposed to the stack) is.

Notably, you can have a Postgres table without a primary key at all, not even an implicit one.

> Based on the limited description of OrioleDB I understand it works like SQLite WITHOUT ROWID, actually storing the row tuple in the primary key b-tree, but I didn’t go read the code

This is my understanding of OrioleDB as well.

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