Indexed heap beats columnar, CSV, Parquet for fast row lookups in PostgreSQL
A Cybertec case study loads 144 million Oracle audit rows into PostgreSQL and pits four storage approaches—heap tables, columnar tables, CSV exports, and Parquet files—against each other. Indexed heap tables win for single‑row queries, while columnar shines on analytic scans and Parquet offers cheap long‑term archiving. The results guide which format to choose for speed versus storage cost.